Dreamweaver vs WordPress
Many people are confused about the difference between a website, a
blog, and a CMS, and choosing which one is right for you can be a
surprisingly complex process. We’ll guide you through the issues you
need to understand so that you can make the best choice.
Essentially, a blog (short for web log) is just a special kind of
website. Blogs are designed to make it easy for anyone to post text and
images to the Internet (even if you don’t know HTML, the programming
language that is at the heart of web design).
CMS is an acronym for “Content Management System.” Basically, a CMS
is just an automated computer program that allows users to quickly and
easily create, delete, or change the content on a website. Newspapers,
magazines, big eCommerce sites like Amazon.com, and blogs all use a CMS
to handle all the photos, text, or multimedia on the hundreds or
thousands of pages on their websites. Here’s one way to think about
things:
- All blogs are CMS’s
- But not all CMS’s are blogs.
Just because it’s easy to add a comment or post to a blog, that
doesn’t mean it’s easy to customize a blog to look the way you want it
to look. If you want a lot of design control and want to vary the design
from page to page, you may be much happier with the design options you
get when you create a custom website with Dreamweaver.
The Design Limitations of a Blog
Most blogs ‘look like blogs’ – meaning they have a banner at the
top, two or three columns, and a they look almost the same from page to
page. Although there are many exceptions (we create custom blogs and
websites with WordPress for clients), creating a custom design for a
WordPress blog requires advanced programming skills.
Blogs tend to look the same from page to page because each page is
created from a template. Blogs are easily updated by filling out a
simple form — bloggers like to say, “If you can write an email. you can
create a blog post.” However, what you gain in automation, you lose in
design options. The more consistent you keep the look of each page of a
blog, the more efficient it is to set up the blog — it’s a trade off.
When Dreamweaver is the best choice
If you want to create a website with highly custom designs, and you
want to vary the designs from page to page, you may want to use Adobe
Dreamweaver. This is the tool that I used to create the page shown here
for actor Yuval David.
Adobe Dreamweaver is the most popular professional web design program
because it offers the most design features. If you love Photoshop,
Illustrator, or InDesign, you’ll probably like
Adobe Dreamweaver.
Adobe’s influence on the interface and integration with other
programs in the suite, gives Dreamweaver a similar look, and it’s got
the best design features of any web program on the market.
If you use every program in the Microsoft Office, or you work in a Microsoft shop, you may like
Expression Web (just don’t use FrontPage).
If you want to create a site like Yuval’s, or the one I created for
photographer Jasper Johal, Dreamweaver makes it easy to create complex
design, without having to learn hard-core programming, like PHP
(required to customize a blog).
Dreamweaver includes a variety of advanced widgets, panels, and other
tools you can use to create custom gallery designs, rollover effects,
and other interactive features. Using Dreamweaver, we could create a
variety of designs for Yuval, so his front page (shown on the left) and
the contact page could be completely different.
Dreamweaver works especially well for relatively small sites. For
almost any site that’s less than 50 pages or so in size, Dreamweaver is
my first choice, and all the program you need (
visit the store to order videos on Dreamweaver).
When WordPress is the best choice
Blogs are especially popular among people who want to share their
opinions, expertise, political views, and stories. We often joke that
WordPress is so easy to use, even politicians can run their own blogs.
Many popular blogs are managed by more than one person, with comments
from many readers, creating a kind of ongoing discussion. Blogs also
include search features and ways to organize information in categories
and topics.
There are a number of blogging programs, including TypePad and
Blogger, but WordPress is the most popular among serious bloggers and
it’s increasingly used as a CMS for small and medium-sized websites.
(Still not quite sure how a CMS or blogging program works? Get the big picture in this article:
How do CMS’s, Blogs, and Dynamic Web Sites work?)
WordPress is popular because the administrative tools, which you use
to update a blog, are relatively easy to learn and don’t require any
programming skills. If you can use a word-processing program, like
Microsoft Word, you can add a post to a blog.
That makes it easy to get started, but like anything there are
trade-offs. If you want to create a custom design for your blog, or you
want to add complex menus, galleries or other features, the learning
curve can get steep fast.
You
can choose from a gazillion templates (called Themes in WordPress), but
if you want to alter those designs, you’ll need to learn PHP, which is
far more complex than HTML and CSS (and trust me, those are complicated
enough).
If you find a theme you’re happy with, or you hire someone (like us)
to create a custom blog design, then all you need to do is update the
pages using the administrative tools, which really is as easy as writing
an email, as you can see from this figure.
The administrative features that come standard with WordPress blogs
make it easy for anyone to post stories and photos. In WordPress, the
administrative page you log into to compose and edit posts is called the
Dashboard. To access the Dashboard of a blog, you need a user name and
password (that keeps it private), but the only program you need on your
computer is a web browser.
Choose the one that’s best for your site
Only you can know if your greatest talent is as a designer, writer,
programmer, photographer, project manager, or all-around techno-wizard,
with the skills and dedication to do all the things necessary to build a
complex, beautiful site all by yourself.
Jasper is a client, friend, and amazing photographer, who specializes
in yoga, fashion, architecture, and tasteful, art nudes of yoga
masters. (If you’re over 18 and tasteful nudes don’t offend you, you can
view his site
here)
For Jasper’s site, Dreamweaver was an easy choice, for two reasons:
- We knew he’d want a lot of design control over every page (he is an artist after all). Dreamweaver allows a talented designer like Jasper to customize the look and feel of each page of a site.
- Because Jasper already uses Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and
many other programs in the Adobe Creative Suite, I knew it wouldn’t be
much of a stretch for him to learn Dreamweaver. His skills as a designer allow him to conceive and then execute any future tweaks on his own.
Why I use WordPress for many of my clients
Increasingly, I use WordPress for client sites because it’s
relatively easy for clients to update their own sites when I’m done.
Most of my clients are business owners, authors, doctors, actors,
scientists — brilliant people one and all — but generally not people
who use a lot of complex software. Learning to use Dreamweaver just to
make updates to a site they’ve hired me to create for them doesn’t make a
lot of sense.
We work with a talented team of designers, writers, video editors,
and programmers with advanced skills in PHP, Java, and other programming
languages. This empowers us to create highly customized websites using
WordPress, including sites that don’t “look like blogs” (such as the
site we created for
XVIVO Scientific Animation, shown on the left).
If you are hiring a web design company to create a site for you, or
you manage a team of employees that includes programmers and designers,
using WordPress or another CMS is almost certainly your best option.
But if you’re creating your own website, and you consider yourself a
creative person, especially if you’re already a fan of other programs in
the Adobe Creative Suite, the by all means, consider
learning Dreamweaver.
Is WordPress the best blogging tool or CMS?
There are many great content management systems on the market. I like
WordPress because of its popularity and ease of use, but you may also
want to consider more advanced CMS options, such as
Joomla! or
Drupal. In this article,
you’ll find a comparison of CMS and blogging tools.
Article Source :
http://www.digitalfamily.com/tutorials/which-program-is-better-dreamweaver-vs-wordpress/
The Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo abelii) is smaller than its Bornean counterpart and has a longer face and lighter and longer coat.
