Why I buy this one ?
- All-in-one design and code editor to support the way you work.
- Build standards-based sites using rich visual tools for XHTML and CSS.
- Integrate XML-based data with a powerful, visual, drag-and-drop workflow.

Directvantage offers this stuff with condition New, new for:

Price : $895.00 Usually ships in 1-2 business days

What our customer's say!

"why won't it work?", I've used Netscape Composer for 7-8 years before "upgrading" to Dreamweaver. I have TWO Dreamweaver manuals. But DW remains SUCH A PAIN to use.

* When I change the template, Dreamweaver should ask me if I want to change all pages created with the template. But sometimes it asks, and sometimes it doesn't. Why? (When it doesn't ask, it means the pages created by the template remain unchanged).

* When I create a template, Dreamweaver puts it in a Template folder. Then when I create a page with it, the internal links all say /Template/index.html or /Template/books.html or whatever. This means that when I upload pages, it can't find other links on the website.

* And if I move the template out of the Template subfolder and try to "update" the links of all pages created with it...well, that doesn't work either.

* Dreamweaver won't let me create my own pages the way I want. I want to pick my own font, size, etc. for each page. But DW keeps forcing "styles" on me. I pick NONE for style. Then when I pick a 14 Font, suddenly DW has picked STYLE 2 (or whatever). So I go back to NONE for style, and now my font is gone.

* Or I'll pick a 14 Font Size, then a Lucinda Sans Font, and now the Font Size is changed. So I change the font size back to 14, and now the font is changed to Verdana, or whatever.

A nightmarish program, in that it doesn't do what I want it do do. I keep redoing, and redoing everything, because sometimes DW will accept my instructions, and sometimes not. Everything has to be done 1 to 8 or so times before DW works.

It's said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. Well, with DW you can do the SAME thing over, and you DO get a DIFFERENT result. Weird.

* Oh yeah, the WYSIWYG feature does NOT work. I previewed a page in Firefox. It looked one way. Then I uploaded the page to my website, and looked at it again in the SAME Firefox -- only now it looks different -- some different fonts, some different colors.

Crappy program.

"Much Better Than Expected", I had been using dreamweaver 4 forever. I had upgraded to MX but could not stand it. MX once opened for the first time you look at it and go "what the hell is going on here" nothing was where you thought it would be, I am pretty sure the designers were drunk. So I went back to using 4. Just got 8 and it is smooth and easy. Things are much different but all better in so many ways. I like programs that you do not have to look at the instructions when you upgrade to a new version. They realy put some thought into making it very intuitive. Go for it and dont look back. Avoid MX like the plague it is though.

"Dreamweaver 8 is a dream come true.", Dreamweaver 8 is the best HTML editor on the market hands down.

There are numerous small design changes from MX 2004 to 8 but the fantastic workspace from MX 2004 is fully intact whether you are a hand coder or a design coder. In fact the hand coder screen (code display) has undergone some very nice time saving improvements (i.e. 1 touch comments) that are very welcome.

The larger improvements that you will find are increased support for CSS, XHTML 1.0 strict, XSLT, JavaScript, XML, and more. Also new is the built in validator for the different types of HTML and CSS... That is a massive timesaver all on its own. Finally the code generated in design view is much cleaner in my opinion. MX 2004 had the habit of putting the code in place without cleaning up previous code; Dreamweaver 8 fixes this problem nicely.

Now that Adobe owns Macromedia I fully expected that Adobe's great customer support would be available and I was right. The customer support was fast, courteous, very helpful, and very patient with all my questions. Not once were my hypothetical questions treated like a burden.

Macromedia had a very high quality, industry standard product on the market with Dreamweaver MX 2004. Now Adobe-Macromedia has an even better product with Dreamweaver 8. You can feel Macromedia's attention to details throughout the product and you can see Adobe's very high standards being lived up to in every nuance.

Worth every cent and maybe a little more.

"Greatest Web tool ever built, but...........", This version on Dreamweaver is the best web tool ever built. It has every feature I could ask for. Too bad it's just too slow to use use for real (making money!). I,m a terrible typist and I can out type it. To switch between GUI view and text view involves a 20 second computer lockup. It's a shame because I absolutely love the product. Maybe one day I will use it for production but not this version.

"Can't transfer license from Windows to Mac", I recently switched Windows to Mac. Since Dreamweaver includes both versions, I thought I could deactivate my Windows machine, and install it on the Mac. After calling their customer service department twice, I was told that this is not possible. Once you activate the product on one platform, you have to buy it again if you want to use it on a different platform.

I might be willing to pay for an upgrade if they were offering a Universal Binary, but currently they are not. They might even view Intel Mac's as a different plaform the Power PC Mac's and try to charge me again if they release an Intel version.

Because their licensing is such a pain, I would not recommend this product to anyone.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Improvements may be great, but what's the point? ", I'm sure there are all kinds of wonderful bells and whistles hiding within the new DW8. I just can't be bothered looking for them, because the program runs at least as slow as its predecessor, MX2004, and that is just a bit too slow for any real productivity. It's a study in frustration to do something as simple as open a file, edit it, and close it. Dreamweaver has to run thru a myriad of internal hoops to facilitate that simple web dev process, and you're left watching the little hourglass spin.

I'm on a decent PC with enough memory, so it's not a hardware issue. This program is simply so bloated and apparently poorly coded that it fails to support the basics of web development. What's the point of having full WYSIWYG control of CSS if it takes too long to open the page in first place?

I've been with this product series since Allaire's Homesite was first launched way back when. Sure, DW has gotten snazzier and more sophisticated, but isn't efficiency and core productivity more important than all the bells & whistles in the world?

"Still the best of the WYSIWYG field", Dreamweaver consistently ranks high in the field of WYSIWYG web site editors. This release does not stray from this position. Considering GoLive and FrontPage are the current competition, it is not hard to see why (will be interesting to see what comes out with Microsoft Expressions Quartz).

As with previous versions, Dreamweaver 8 has the standard Dreamweaver interface. When you install, you have the option of setting up like a developer or setting up like a designer. It is not as easy to change the scheme (or not as evident), but this is not a major deal as a single developer rarely changes the setup of his development environment.

Dreamweaver 8 touts itself as the king of CSS and it has certainly made some wonderful inroads. By default, you can create styles in a page or in a stylesheet. Unfortunately, it falls a little short in allowing you to change your mind in this place, as well. It would be nice, for example, to drag tested styles from a test page up to the stylesheet. Instead, I have to manually cut and paste or recreate styles. Yes, this is minor, but can't someone make a tool that does this? I would also love to see a tool that recognizes I have already created a style with the same feature or allows me to use the standard font and paragraph changes and automatically create a style. But, I digress, there is no tool that does that ... yet.

The CSS Styles tab gives you a great way of getting down to the properties of a particular CSS style. If you do not want to bring up the designer, which is how you normally create your style, you simply add properties to the style in the CSS Styles tab. Very nice feature. A little different than the properties view in MS products, but much more compact.

Dreamweaver 8 is better at .NET development than FrontPage. It also allows a variety of other development paradigms: ASP (either VBScript or JavaScript), ASP.NET (C# or VB.NET), ColdFusion, JSP and PHP (with MySQL). This makes it a good all around tool for development. I would still not trade my Visual Studio, but Dreamweaver gives me a lot of bang for my buck and Visual Studio has a horrible design surface (at least in the latest implementation - VS 2005).

Dreamweaver still has the best behaviors (client side scripting), but they have not made any real inroads to new functionality in this regard. This has been a major selling point to me in the past and I wish they would have included something to help with AJAX (Asynch JavaScript and XML).

Of the new features, I find the CSS most compelling (mentioned above) and also very aggrevating (Macromedia did not take them far enough for my likings). You also have the ability to zoom on design and use guides (good for CSS layouts). There is also a better Flash integration and collapsable code regions. None of these are grand enough for me to personally take the upgrade plunge.

Down to the nitty gritty. Here are the questions you are probably wanting to know the answer to.

1. Should you buy Dreamweaver (assuming you do not already own a previous version)? It really depends. If you do not have a tool, this is still the best on the market. If you have FrontPage, you might get Dreamweaver if you need the flexibility of working outside of the Microsoft world, otherwise I would say no. The same is true if you have GoLive, as it has many similar features.

2. Should you upgrade? This really comes down to a few features and how important they are to you.

A) If you are heavy on CSS, you might want to upgrade, although I am not sure that this is the best option unless Macromedia really fills in this area. It was not quite enough for me to feel compelled to move on right now.

B) Use a lot of flash? The time savings might be a good reason to move to this version.

C) Need productivity helps, like code collapse, guides and the ability to zoom in on your design? This is the only tool I know of currently that has these features.

Dreamweaver 8 is a good product. If I did not have a previous version, I would seriously consider the cost and bite the bullet, as I feel it is worth the price ($399 street). But, I do not see it worth the $199 street price for the upgrade, aty least not for me. The additional CSS is nice, but it is not enough of a productivity change for me to justify the cost, esp. when I am fairly fast at working with CSS without the additional features.

"Much Improved", This version of Dreamweaver is mounds better than 2004. It loads just as fast as MX did, runs flawlessly and stable, just like MX did. MX 2004 sucked, plain and simple. It was buggy, slow, and it had all that activation crap processes running in the background. I must have counted a total of 3 extra processes running just for Dreamweaver to run. Just for the crappy licensing. CSS has been better intergrated and so has flash video. This is definetly worth the upgrade. Being as how adobe just bought macromedia, i imagine the versions are only going to get crappier since adobe has no competition now. So i'd upgrade to this one while you have the chance, as no other web editing software really compares to dreamweaver.

"Clean, fast, efficient... more productive", Having used Dreamweaver for many years, as both a design and coding (PHP) tool... it was wonderful to begin using 8 and right away noticing the MAJOR improvements.

Most noteably it seems that they got rid of a lot of the "bloat" that made MX so sluggish. Another major plus is the posting window that puts along in the background, freeing DW up to continue working on other things.

Thoroughly impressed so far. Have not played too much with new CSS support but looking forward to seeing improvements there as well.

"Windows 98???", You've GOT to be kidding me... What web developer -- or even a power-user uses Windows 98 anymore?? I am stunned that people who written reviews in here are even mentioning this "flaw". Dreamweaver rocks!!