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Nelsun · Mar 6, 2004, 11:37 PM

Hi-

I'm planning to purchase the Adobe Creative Suite. I am experienced with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop in my work. But I've never used GoLive. I had also been looking into purchasing Dreamweaver.

I want to know if anyone can give me a sense of which is a better tool to use for webdesign. I'm told that Dreamweaver is quite intuitivr to use. Yet I know Adobe products, so I'm guessing the interface of GoLive will be very similar to Illustrator and Photoshop and I know they will talk to GoLive. If GoLive is going to be as easy to use as Dreamweaver, then I may opt to go the CS route.

Thank you for your input!

Nelson

godzookie2k · Mar 7, 2004, 06:58 AM

golive isn't really anything like the PSCS and ILCS. Its a good program, I don't really use it, but the CS version is pretty tight. I go dreamweaver any day of the week instead of golive. DW tends to be a bit more... "power user" friendly rather than golive, but thats just me. I'd say download both of the demos and see which you like more. They're both pretty doggish under osx.

Nelsun · Mar 7, 2004, 07:46 PM

Thanks for the advise. I'm leaning towards Dreamweaver more and more. Downloading demos is a good suggestion.

Thanks again. Nelson

Super Glitcher · Mar 8, 2004, 03:35 AM

dreamweaver is way better, at least for me anyway. I freaking love adobe but MM got this one right on target. I agree with the power user friendly spot- it's got a very intuitive workflow to it + it is SLUGGISH under X... maybe once I pick up that G5..

har har har

Nelsun · Mar 8, 2004, 04:16 PM

Thanks, all this has been very helpful feedback!

Nelson

godzookie2k · Mar 10, 2004, 02:46 AM

super: there are a lot of good speedup tips on macromedias site. I know once I turned off the document toolbar I got a major speed burst. do a mm.com technotes search.

gadster · Mar 12, 2004, 08:01 AM

Depends what is meant by power user. The Adobe suite has awesome integration: the client wants to change the menuing system through the whole site? No worries, in Golive just double click the menu smart object, edit as per... save and upload, job done. If you haven't learned either piece of software well yet, I'd have recommend GL, just for the integration.

godzookie2k · Mar 13, 2004, 04:17 AM

holy shitastic the new dreamweaver 2004 .1 updater cures all ills.

cowerd · Mar 13, 2004, 03:03 PM

Golive still inserts custom code and mangles css files (css box model hacks for IE have leading and trailing slashes stripped) when editing them in Golive CS.

Best bets for webdesign: a good text editor, bookmarks to meyerweb and others, lots of browsers on hand, and a boatload of patience.

godzookie2k · Mar 14, 2004, 04:39 AM

dw in code mode actually isn't all that bad. autocompletion as you type is great. It also (for me) keeps me in xhtml spec, sometimes when I'm coding too fast I stray back to html 4 and back to xhtml and screw things all up. But that might just be me.

also kinda nice for spelling reminders on attributes, I'm always typing visible instead of visibility and other stuff.

calimehtar · Mar 15, 2004, 09:49 AM

I think Cowerd's got the right idea. I use Golive because it's cheaper than dreamweaver and does a few things that most text-editors won't like give you image dimensions automatically, allow you to easily perform a search-and-replace in an entire website, and let you rename a file and automatically update all links that reference it. Otherwise I use a plain text editor.

The bells and whistles in both Golive and Dreamweaver are either going to screw you up, or else teach you to be a lazy designer, or both.

quietjim · Mar 15, 2004, 01:32 PM

I've spent the morning using Dreamweaver MX 2004 7.01 (the updated version) and I have to say that it seems like Macromedia has fixed the most significant problems with DW. It now runs smoothly on my Pismo (400 MHz), should be even better when I get a new AlBook in a month or so. So great to have DW back to being a pleasure to use.

aprilcarter · Mar 15, 2004, 02:37 PM

I use both -- Dreamweaver at work and GoLive at home -- and have no preference. I think they are both great.

godzookie2k · Mar 16, 2004, 03:19 AM

if you are rocking the text editor route bbedit is your friend. (commercial) subthaedit aint bad if your needs are simpler. (free)

cowerd · Mar 16, 2004, 11:17 AM

if you're doing css sites a text editor is the best way to go.

fire up bbedit and as many browsers as you have the patience to test and have at it.

DeathMan · Mar 18, 2004, 07:48 PM

Also an awesome app for CSS is CSSEdit, by Jan Van Boghout (a macnn member). This things is aces for making CSS easy to learn and use. It has two modes, code mode and gui mode, similar in theory to Dreamweaver. Usually, I use code mode, but if I can't remember something, I can switch to gui mode, and just set the styles, and go back, and look and see how it is supposed to work. It also has some super auto complete features to make working much quicker.

http://macrabbit.com

wang_himself · Mar 19, 2004, 06:04 AM

Both make crap code, however GoLive is like using Microsoft Word to design a webpage. I go and do use dreamweaver, however I like to edit the code by hand and optimize it for the large dial-up audience most of the sites I design still see.

aprilcarter · Apr 8, 2004, 10:05 AM

Although I said I had no preference between GoLive and Dreamweaver, in my experience, Dreamweaver is worse about generating excess "junk" code that has to be deleted or fixed.

I will agree with Wang -- going through and streamlining the code is a necessity, whatever you use.

Photo678 · Apr 9, 2004, 03:58 PM

Has anyone in the past day or so tried to download the trial from the adobe site. When i do and i unstuff it, it unstuffs then trys to mount, returns an error about no mountable file system or something like that.

I tried emailing them, but they suck

hart · Jul 26, 2004, 01:21 PM

Originally posted by Nelsun:
Hi-

I'm planning to purchase the Adobe Creative Suite. I am experienced with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop in my work. But I've never used GoLive. I had also been looking into purchasing Dreamweaver.

I want to know if anyone can give me a sense of which is a better tool to use for webdesign. I'm told that Dreamweaver is quite intuitivr to use. Yet I know Adobe products, so I'm guessing the interface of GoLive will be very similar to Illustrator and Photoshop and I know they will talk to GoLive. If GoLive is going to be as easy to use as Dreamweaver, then I may opt to go the CS route.

Nelson

so it's several months later, updates applied, are you all still generally sticking with Dreamweaver or is the crowd wavering? I'm learning from scratch myself and have to pick one or perhaps get both which would probably confuse me totally. I like the idea of the integrated Adobe suite but it seems that Dreamweaver still wins the popularity contest.

any opinions?