I recently upgraded all my software that I use for development by purchasing the Adobe CS2 suite which includes Photoshop, InDesign, GoLive, ImageReady, Illustrator, Acrobat and Macromedias Dreamweaver 8.

I had already been using older versions of Dreamweaver and recently tried Dreamweaver 8. Dreamweaver is very intuitive to me and is a great tool for editing several pages at once in code view or layout view. I like its tabbing of open pages and its interaction with the external CSS stylesheet. I am not as confortable usiing the layout view as I am the code view. The CSS editor is very intuitive and changes update any open HTML page. The CSS support is the best of any programs I have tried.

I have only played around with GoLive for a couple of days, but right out of the box I can tell you it is not as intuitive as Dreamweaver 8. While GoLive has support for CSS its a bit of a chore to navigate between the stylesheet and the HTML document. There are no tabs for the various pages so you have to swap windows or open the CSS dialog boxes. Once I figured out the layout tool components I did find them to be more friendly than Dreamweavers. GoLive seems to more easily nest div layers and seems to know to create a new CSS item. Unfortuanately it creates it in the head section of the HTML page rather than the CSS stylesheet. Go live has better meta data support for site structure and related pages. It has a similar feel to older versions of frontpage.

Adobe could do well to take the most usable features from GoLive and Dreamweaver and create one easy to use but powerful web standards compliant development tool. If the suite is too expensive you might be able to get by with Dreamweaver and Photoshop.

FREEWARE:
In my arsenal of software I still tend to use notepad for quick edits. My hosting company also has a text editor built into thier file manager. Vdeck is the most friendly text editor while HSphere takes some extra clicks to get into edit mode.

IF you want freeware code development tools that supports everything from basic HTML to PHP/Javascript/ASP there is HTML-Kit. This is about the best of the loaded text editors and site previewers for hand coders. Some of the features and plugins added over the last few years have made this a very robust tool. I like the ease of tag selection in a dropdown style. The software has a learning curve but is a major time saver. You can learn more at: www.chami.com/html-kit/

Related Books and Software:

Microsoft is pushing a new Photo format for digital cameras and other image applications to replace JPEG. It is not clear whether the new format will be supported in web browsers or will merely be used for print and storage applications. The new format claims to half the size of JPEG and will be supported in the Adobe CS2/CS3 applications.

Microsoft will soon submit a new photo format to an international standards organization that it says offers higher quality images with better compression, the company said on Thursday.

The format, HD Photo — recently renamed from Windows Media Photo — is taking aim at the JPEG format, a 15-year old technology still widely used in digital cameras and image applications.» Read more…

By Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service
March 08, 2007

I have a new web development project which may require me to move to a content management system. Having a CMS allows me to build templates and CSS stylesheets but lets the site owner control content on various pages. CMS allows me to create global elements like header graphics , sidebar menus, and footers, in the same manner I am used to, and call them using the templates. A large site might have several different templates such as a home page, simple text page, multiple boxes of text pages, etc…

The CMS provides a framework around which templates, stylesheets, pages, global content, user management, and all other controls are housed. Usually there are simple wysiwyg text editors for inputing text as content. Editors for creating stylesheets and templates are even simpler. The syntax for templates has a bit of a learning curve but if you are familiar with PHP or ASP implementations this should not take too long. There are also modules for blogging, news, and forums which are all tied to the same framework and database so elements from these can be reused in the site pages. Some even have eCommerce plugins or addons.

So what do these fancy frameworks costs? They range from opensource freeware to enterprise level systems built to enterprise standards. $0 to as much as you can possibly spend.

Joomla is probably the most popular of the opensource CMS systems. I mucked around the backend and figured out how to do a couple of things. It wasn’t very intuitive to me. Joomla has broad support for add-on modules which add functionality to the core framework. I have seen this system used by a computer novice to relaunch a site. While his learning curve was steep, he managed to create the entire site in the style he wanted with all the features he wanted.

CMS Made Simple is truly easy to install and begin using. Within a few minutes I was able to manipulate the standard stylesheets, templates, and content. I was able to edit as I pleased and felt the system was very intuitive. While this is opensource there is a commercial license available to remove any GNU-GPL branding.

On the other end of the cost spectrum is Hannon Hill’s Cascade Server. This content manager is extremely robust. Not only do you get the content management but your data is stored as XML and can be output in various formats. This CMS is more for large scale businesses with multiple departments managing various content. Their ROI calcultor suggests the core system starts around $40,000 + annual maintenance. You also get training and support from the company.

If that wasn’t enough for you and you really want to program custom reports, manage page content, and build executive dashboards then you can research the enterprise level business intelligence systems like Information Builders WebFOCUS. Built on the mainframe language FOCUS, webFOCUS has client based PC tools which allow developers to build amazing data portals. Administrators can control user access or publish the web pages to the public as a stand alone application. These systems can query multiple data resources from Excel to Oracle. They have translation engines that let you write queries using only one language (focus) but also allow you to