Yes­ter­day, I read a great write up over on PC Pro about how Adobe’s Dreamweaver is dying off as an option for design­ers look­ing to make the switch from print to web design. I couldn’t agree more! Like they point out, the web is no longer sta­tic mean­ing you can’t run a site by build­ing it one page at a time. You need dynamic con­tent that builds itself, which Dreamweaver can’t help you with.

Using Dreamweaver or another HTML/CSS page-based builder is slow and more work than a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS) like Word­Press, Joomla, or Dru­pal. Main­tain­ing a sta­tic site is a pain because every time you want to add on or change some­thing you have to do it man­u­ally across mul­ti­ple pages. If I want to add a page or change my ‘About’ link to say ‘Bio’, I just have to do it once with Word­Press and my entire site is changed. I would have to hunt down every link to my ‘About’ page on a sta­tic site and change each and every link.

What eats at me is that Dreamweaver and these sta­tic page cre­ation tech­niques are still all that is taught at the col­lege level (at least at IU). I’m cur­rently in a class learn­ing Dreamweaver while also teach­ing a class about Dreamweaver. When I’m the stu­dent, I politely tell the teacher I’d rather code by hand in Tex­tWran­gler, but when I’m the teacher I have to stick to the cur­ricu­lum pro­vided for me. Nei­ther of these classes are even both­er­ing to cover the basics of HTML and CSS which is even worse! Point here, click here, drag this– presto you’re a web designer…

The other com­puter sci­ence class I’ve taught goes over HTML and CSS, but to no real depth beyond what you can get through in an hour or two on W3Schools. They at least tell stu­dents not to use GUI edi­tors like Dreamweaver. Actu­ally, it seems this semes­ter they are allow­ing kids to use them based on what some­one I tutor told me. Tsk, tsk.

Where are the classes on Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tems? How about a class just to learn to cre­ate a data­base dri­ven site built with PHP? It’s a good start to know the ins and outs of HTML and CSS, and def­i­nitely to get a basic under­stand­ing of JavaScript, but I think it’s time for acad­e­mia to take the next step and apply these basics to what stu­dents actu­ally use in the real world. They should know HTML tags to cre­ate seman­tic blog posts, CSS to cre­ate a flex­i­ble theme for their CMS of choice, and know enough JavaScript to cre­ate an image gallery or AJAX con­tact form.

I met with some­one last week who was cold call­ing soror­i­ties and fra­ter­ni­ties to gain web design expe­ri­ence. He was a col­lege grad­u­ate with a degree in graphic design and based his entire web design knowl­edge in Dreamweaver. Because he relied on it as his only tool, he had no idea what it meant to con­nect via SSH or that the entire site he wanted to edit in Dreamweaver was built in Flash. I rest my case on why Dreamweaver is dead and those who use it out­right aren’t far behind.