Dreamweaver MX - The Pro's Perspective

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To find out how useful Dreamweaver MX is for intranet developers, we went straight to the pros themselves. Maybe the features look good to you on paper, but you need to justify the expense of upgrading to yourself and your manager. After all, how much time are these new tweaks really going to save you? And what great improvements that should have been there didn't make the cut? Read on for thoughts from people who have already started using MX and learn how they're using its new tools on their company's intranets.

John T. Pratt of Ford Motor Company manages more than one site on Ford's vast constellation of 1,500 internal Web sites. A Web Administrator in the Dearborn, Michigan, office, Pratt works for the material planning and logistics division, and is responsible for 75 internal Web sites and Web applications under his domain. Combined, those sites garner a total of 1.2 million hits each month. He's been a Dreamweaver user since version 3.0, and finds MX a huge step forward.

Take something as small as the interface improvements: the floating palette look that Dreamweaver previously featured (and which is still there, should you want to return to it) appealed more to Macintosh users, and was visually dissimilar to the applications that Windows users knew. So the new tabbed interface is more than a space-saver for Pratt, it's an easier way of working.

"It takes away a whole mental block we had with the old version that was really freaking people out," Pratt says.

The new interface also appeals to Steve Glick, the senior Web developer in the human resources department at St. John Health System, a large health care corporation also based in Michigan. While Glick doesn't have to worry about familiarizing other workers with Dreamweaver, he sees the interface changes as a productivity-enhancer for his own work.

"It seems more intuitive. I used to spend so much time trying to find the right window," Glick says. "I like that the panels and the inspectors are all arranged in one window, under MX. I have a 19-inch monitor and with 4.0 I was always pushing the property inspector out of the way." He adds that, previously, he would have to adjust all this windows correctly-resizing them and setting them side-by-side-before he could begin working on a project. Now he can begin working at once.

Macromedia's combining of Dreamweaver and UltraDev also appeals to Pratt. As the head of his department, he's the point person responsible for juggling the growing number of Dreamweaver and UltraDev licenses for his workers. Now, there's one fewer license he needs to worry about.

"Everybody's on the same thing, regardless of their job function," Pratt says.

The nested templates are already saving Pratt time. "It's helpful to be able to put one template inside another," he says. Pratt was a beta tester for Dreamweaver while it was in development, so he not only knows the new features, he's already implementing them. With nested templates, he can create one overall template that contains the basic framework for his division, then create department-specific nested templates that live inside that framework. It greatly cuts down on the number of templates that he needs to maintain.

The improved code reference features will be an asset, Pratt says, to his employees who want to upgrade their skills and begin writing code. With Dreamweaver MX, he says, the application now provides enough code help that beginners can feel comfortable beginning to write it.

But this backslapping doesn't mean that all of Glick's and Pratt's wishes were fulfilled with Dreamweaver MX. In fact, when asked, both said that Dreamweaver still needed the same thing: better templates for beginning site-creation. They weren't talking about the kind of templates that site developers can make themselves, to generate standardized pages, but templates for basic types of pages that the program itself would provide, as a shortcut. Of the major Web site development tools, only Microsoft FrontPage provides a wide variety of templates and site themes that let users create a small site in almost no time.

Such templates would "give a good head start," Glick says. Dreamweaver MX does provide some standardized content, allowing users to quickly create common page elements, but it still doesn't provide the kind of step-by-step creation tools that neophytes enjoy. Glick says that he'd like to see more business templates, and would even consider buying a separate add-in pack, if it provided them. "There isn't a lot of sample content to go from," Pratt agrees, noting that they would be useful to a variety of users.