When is it best to use Dreamweaver vs. WordPress, Drupal or Joomla to create a website?
Dreamweaver has long been the industry-leading web authoring and editing software that provides both visual and code-level capabilities for creating standards-based websites, smartphones, tablets and other devices. It is feature-packed and gives designers complete control over HTML, CSS, JavaScript and all other aspects of creating modern websites. For building sites from scratch, Dreamweaver is often the tool of choice.
WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are all web-based content management systems (CMS) that provide the tools and features necessary for creating and maintaining blogs and websites. (Read about the strengths of each CMS.) While Dreamweaver is well-suited for designing and building websites from scratch, content management systems are usually honed for ongoing maintenance, like updating content and posting new blog entries.
Most of my web design work involves using Dreamweaver to create templates, themes, and plug-ins that get added to content management systems. The final result is a website custom designed with the functionality your organization needs on your website, but with the added benefit of being able to update the website content yourself using any popular web browser.
So the short answer: Dreamweaver is often the best solution for a powerful tool that gives you complete freedom over the design and programming of websites, while a CMS is used for ongoing maintenance of your website. That’s why nearly all websites I provide for clients are built to work in a CMS like WordPress.
Want to know more? Need a suggestion for which CMS is best for you? Get in touch and we can discuss your project in more detail.
A few more notes…
- Adobe released a new version of Dreamweaver CC on October 18, 2017.
- If you’re a student or teacher, you can get a pretty good discount on Dreamweaver CC and the Adobe Create Cloud.
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