Hi
I am stunned at the quality of the responses I have read here. Seems to be an excellent forum.
 I am not a programmer but I have designed a fairly complex web application with conversation, excel sheets and finally a formal spec. I have two colleagues working part tome on the development side and we have the beginnings of a web site, They are excellent at what they do. Our site uses PHP, JavaScript, PostgreSQL /MySQL, HTML and CSS. GNU Linux will be used for both development and production.
My side of the designing has more or less been finished and I now want to assist by learning Dreamweaver as a means of getting my design on screen into which the PHP etc can be dumped.
Please let me have your honest opinion as to whether Dreamweaver would be suitable for my needs. I have just completed the Macromedia free course Leanthat which
Also currently I do not have your book Beginning Dreamweaver MX 2004 but would certainly get it. Does it have courses/lessons on a CD.
If the above is yes how easy would it be to migrate a site to Dreamweaver.
Looking forward to hearing from you
Jacky Kenna

Hi Jacky,

Thanks for your personal message; I'll answer here if you don't mind.

First off, I don't think you "migrate a site to Dreamweaver". I am not sure if this is a term confusion, or a misunderstanding on your side, so I'd like to clear that up.

With Dreamweaver you can build sites in many server side languages like PHP, ASP, JSP etc, or create simple static HTML sites. In it's simplest form, Dreamweaver is like Notepad in that it allows you to create text based source files. However, it's much more than that as it allows you to build complex, dynamic, database driven web sites.

The language of your choice largely depends on personal preference, background, production platform, books you may have (or get) and friend's preferences. In your case, PHP seems the way to go.

Beginning Dreamweaver MX 2004 (a great book for learning DW and ASP) has a strong focus towards ASP. The three sites built in the book are created with ASP. The appendices explain how to set up a site with PHP and JSP but there's not as much detail as there is for ASP.

If I understand you correctly, you'd be mostly oriented on the design, right? That is, general layout, XHTML templates and CSS, and leave the PHP to programmers?

Dreamweaver, possible in combination with Fireworks MX 2004 can definitely be used for that kind of task. In fact, IMO it's probably the best tool for that kind of job.

Hope this sheds some light, and feel free to ask any more questions....

Cheers,

Imar
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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.