[wetstuff]

I have used DW for 10+ years. 'Used' to me, means I simply make basic pages in Photoshop and use them as images in DW ..maybe add a comment at the bottom and simply hang them in a folder. I do not know (nor really have time/care to know) anything about coding, CCS, etc...

But, now with Lion, my MX2004 no longer works. It's $200 to upgrade to 5.5. I looked at RapidWeaver but 90% of what I read says it buggy and a PITA. iWeb is too simple .. even for me! Plus, I need to be able to port over four existing sites from DW... Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.

Jim

[downpour]

There aren't any...

Adobe has far too much of a monopoly on things like this. It's like Indesign, try finding a good cheap alternative to that.

Your best bet is probably just coding your sites by hand in a good text editor and uploading them with FTP. You will learn to be a better web designer that way... things have moved on since MX4 was around, no more laying things out in a table... generally these days, with HTML5, you want to keep your content as simple as possible and use CSS to change the way it looks.

I'm lucky enough to have Dreamweaver CS5.5 at work, but 99% of my time is spent in the code view and uploading and downloading files. Even with the latest version, the preview isn't a very accurate representation of what you actually get, so I just tend to use Chrome to view my changes. Chrome also has an excellent debugger for viewing page structure and dynamic elements created by javascript etc.

I have tried alternatives like Coda etc... but I didn't really like them, I am just too used to Dreamweaver I guess... and there are no other apps that I have found, that really emulate that way of working.

[Thorzdad]

I have DW CS5 here (Part of Creative Suite 5. I refuse to pay the extortionate rate for a .5 update) I hate it. It's a horribly-designed app. I've said elsewhere that DW CS5 is the wysiwyg app that devs who hate wysiwyg apps would write, just to prove themselves right.

I managed to snag a copy of GoLive 9 and use it. It's a far better-designed app than DW 5. It was the last version Adobe made and it's a Universal app. Not sure if it'll run in Lion, though. Not sure why it wouldn't.

[wetstuff]

Thanks guys.. DP, I'm really lame in that I do not believe I have ever looked at coding. I've been a Macuser since the late 80's but cringe at the thought of 'code'.. or even 'Right Click' (WTF iszat?). I make pages (one site had 400+ entries, 'till I cleaned it up to 100+) like your grandmother made pictures in an 'album'. The big difference, the #3 page in my album may have a button that opens pg. 44 automatically. I rarely used DW to add text. I got good at doing all that in Photoshop. I do not care about search bots.

TD, " Not sure why it wouldn't." .. the error message I get is: "...PowerPC apps no longer supported." Maybe GoLive suffers the same fate.. Luckily, I have another iMac in the other room that is still Snow Leopard, so with some annoyance I can do all my DW over there. Anyway, thanks again. 'Best to you.

Jim