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See also Webfolio, Whimsy, + I Art Wert
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Making Gary Wright Proud
How a little open-mindedness can cause a fundamental, if minor, shift in one's life
February 11, 2000
I've only used it for a few days and already I can see the difference: Dreamweaver is going to change the way I work.
For years now, I've been working straight with code when I mark up HTML. It's how I learned, and how I think. I can look at a piece of paper and explain, line by line, what HTML code would be needed to replicate it. Early WYSIWYG web-publishing programs were terrible, and with all the content production I've done, it made the most sense for me to use my trusty BBEdit all the time.
With a new job comes new opportunities, though, and I installed Dreamweaver 3 a few weeks back, determined to see why many designers swear by it.
I am so happy.
Dreamweaver takes much of the fuss out of getting a page developed. Its code is clean, its document structure easy to read. I can watch myself make a page instead of visualizing it in my head, and I don't have to type out dozens of lines of HTML for each page I create.
My excitement here isn't over Dreamweaver, though, so much as it is my new method of working. I no longer have to slog through manual table building to get one started (even with shortcuts, I always found it easiest to make one by hand). I don't have to think about each step I do -- "now, do I want this rowspan to be two or three?" -- because I can simply watch it happen.
At the same time, my inside knowledge of HTML just becomes more valuable. I can now open the hood, as it were, to tinker with things. I know how to make a page do something that Dreamweaver can't (or at least that I haven't learned how to tell it to do), and I can still do it myself, but without the distraction the hour of initial development would have taken. I can fine-tune to my heart's content or flip back into Dreamweaver and loll my way around with similar results.
This is not unlike my upgrading to Fetch 3.0.3 from 2.5 a few years back. Suddenly I had drag-and-drop FTP capabilities, and a major task instantly became more user-friendly. What I learned hasn't changed, and how it worked hasn't changed. But the tools I rely on became capable of doing the things I wanted them to do.
There's really nothing special about a software upgrade, especially when I'm discovering a product that many of my peers are already using. But the thought that my job just became noticeably easier without altering my productivity overwhelmed me today.
And I thought I was a speedy web designer before....
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