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.