Is Dreamweaver CS3 Worth It?

It's a question I get asked a lot. In the hallway, on my way to or from a meeting or class… "Is Dreamweaver CS3 Worth It?"

My answer is almost always "Yes!" Dreamweaver changes pretty frequently, these days. And the last several revisions have brought an increasing emphasis on Web Standards, doing more things the right way, easier, than ever before.

We used to get a new Dreamweaver every two or three years, but they're coming much faster, now. The developers would take note of comments and service issues and we would get bug fixes and new features at regular intervals. Still, version One looked an awful lot like version Three, and so on. That all stopped with what would have been Dreamweaver 6.

I like to say that about that time, they hired a man of Vision, and the result was Dreamweaver MX 2000, with a whole new look and a great many new features aimed at making it easier to build standards-compliant pages. Dreamweaver MX 2004 was next, building on the interface of the previous release. If you had a Dreamweaver 3 or Dreamweaver 4 book, you were kind of lost. But if you had a Dreamweaver MX 2000 book, you could still find your way around and puzzle-out the new features. Then, according to my theory, the man of Vision must have quit, because the next box was again labeled just "Dreamweaver 8".

But the same thing held true, with regard to books and features. If you had a Dreamweaver MX 2004 book, or even a Dreamweaver MX 2000 book, you could find your way through Dreamweaver 8, even if that meant missing out on a few of the latest features. The work flow and interface has changed only minimally over the recent past.

What would have been Dreamweaver MX 2007 or Dreamweaver 9, maybe, is now called Dreamweaver CS3 (the CS standing for Creative Suite). Once again, in many ways it looks like Dreamweaver 8, Dreamweaver MX 2004 or even Dreamweaver MX 2000. But there are a great many features and benefits, especially helpful for us here at UNL using the Templates to build pages. Good work has been done in upgrading CSS positioning support, creating pages, adding Assets, Snippets and Library items and also interfacing with various scripting languages.

If your department, college or campus organization has some upgrade money in the budget, I'd recommend getting Dreamweaver CS3. If you only just recently made the move to Dreamweaver 8, you can probably wait a while before upgrading, with the understanding that computer software is a lot like fresh fish: the older it gets, the less anybody wants it. Dreamweaver CS3 is going to be current a lot longer than Dreamweaver MX 2004 will remain usable, let's put it that way.