DreamWeaverMX reviewOverall DreamWeaverMX 2004 is a great product, but definetly not worth an upgrade from DreamWeaverMX . There are very few differences. However if your a serious Web Designer DreamWeaverMX or DreamWeaverMX 2004 is a definite must for your toolbox. It is most definitely the most productive, flexible, stable and expandable web design software on the market. It’s one of the least expensive too!

Made by Macromedia, DreamWeaverMX gives you a excellent code view editor or WYSIWYG environment. It comes with a standard library of JavaScript “Behaviors” that5 you can attach directly to page element (like images). It also has a repository of “snippets” (bits and pieces of code written in any language, stored in plain text form), that is as easy as “copy and paste” to add your own snippets to, so you can reuse them later.

Macromedia’s DreamWeaverMX 2004 (and all previous versions) works well with all web programming languages, databases, CSS, AJAX, and it’s environment is designed to work with any technology that isn’t developed yet.

That may change now that their competitor, Adobe, has bought Macromedia. They have a far inferior software called “Go Live” that you don’t really want to even try to use much less pay over a thousand dollars for.

Other web page editing and creation software:

  • Microsoft Front Page: It’s inexpensive, easy to use (for the basics only), and with very complicated processes you can embed other microsoft Office technologies into web pages. The bad news, it hates non-microsoft technology like flash, java, PHP, mySQL etc etc etc. If you don’t know how to make web pages from by writing HTML in a plain text editor, then you should hire someone. But if you must dive headfirst into a very complicated process you know nothing about, this software is for you. And one more thing, it only works on windows and most of the web pages it out puts only work on windows and Internet Explorer (which will alienate at least 20% of your viewers).
  • Net Object’s Fusion: You really want to avoid this software. It’s very complicated to make the most basic pages and anything extra, well, costs extra. It also says it lets you write your own code and scripts, but it usually doesn’t.