When Dreamweaver Has a Complete Advantage

Some cases when Dreamweaver has a complete advantage over web text editors

Dreamweaver is considered by many one of the best HTML editors, if not THE BEST HTML editor currently available. It’s more than just another WYSIWYG [What you see is what you get] software where you can design/develop web page without having to know HTML. I will have multiple posts about Dreamweaver and how to use it to create websites and HTML emails for marketing professionals. This post is going to be about how using Dreamweaver saved me and probably you lots of time and efforts compared to using a text editor.

When Dreamweaver becomes a complete advantage over text editors

At the company where I’m working for, we hand-code with a text editor. Web developers/ programmers hand-code to build and develop web page and back-end database, and marketing people hand-code to maintain and update marketing content. Many times I wished to have Dreamweaver so that it could save me tons of time and save me from doing one thing over and over again.

• Bringing long data table from Word/Excel to HTML: If you’re in marketing, chances are you’ve already dealt with long data table created in Excel or Word such as price list, inventory list, list of distributors, phone list… The fastest and easiest way to bring this list onto your website is to create a link to the Excel/Word/PDF document where people can click and download it. However, if you have to bring that list to a web page as an HTML table to make it more convenient for your users, and if you/your team care about the cleanliness of your codes, Dreamweaver will be of great help. All you need to do is to copy the table from Word/Excel; open a new HTML file in Dreamweaver; then paste the table in the Design area [with the Design tab activated]. The whole table will be created in HTML in front of your eyes.
  
  
• Build complicated HTML data table: Data table again, if you have to build from scratch a complicated HTML table. Dreamweaver will make it much more easier. Using Dreamweaver in the Design area is like using MS Word or Excel. You can Insert/Table; then specify the number of rows and columns; you can merge cells easily by selecting the cells, right click and merge them. Creating an HTML table is by no means difficult nor complicated in terms of coding; however, creating a complicated HTML table with many merged cells/rows/columns can be tricky, and Dreamweaver helps you take the guesswork out of the process and saves tons of time.
  
  
• Mass change text such as your company name or product name: If your company name or your product name is changed, and you need to reflect the change in tens of or even hundreds of web pages, Dreamweaver “find and replace” capability will make it extremely quick. Dreamweaver can find and replace text within selected text, a file, multiple files, a folder, or the whole web site. Just imagine if you have to do it one by one manually. Not fun definitely!
  
  
• Check for broken links and invalid/wrong coding: If broken link is a big deal to you/your company, and it should be, Dreamweaver helps minimize or eliminate broken links. Dreamweaver can check your whole site for broken text links, broken image links… It can also check and validate your HTML codes to see if you’ve used any invalid tags/codes, whether your code is up to the web standard.
  
  
• Move your folders around: Hopefully you don’t ever have to move folders insides your website around. However, if you have to, say move the /public_site image folder to under /images folder. You probably already know that doing something like that will make all links to your /public_site images broken because now instead of public_site alone, the path to the images should become /images/public_site/… Without Dreamweaver, you’ll need to go to all affected pages and manually change the path. If you Manage your site with Dreamweaver by using menu Site/Mange sites, and if you drag public_site folder and drop it under images in Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver will automatically track the affected files and ask you if you want to the update the change accordingly. How neat!

Well, that’s it for now. Hope it’s helpful.

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