I use this exclusively to make my websites. I've been using this for a long time. Like all old webmasters I started manually coding and using the built in editor of Netscape before a product called Internet Explorer even existed. From there I used a series of mom & pop programs making manual coding easier and duplicatable (I know it's not a word but just patronize me a little here). Then the software god, MS, came along with FrontPage. FrontPage (FP) was doomed from the start since its concept was based on the entire web using MS operating system computers. They eventually had to bite the bullet and make a UNIX solution. This "fix" was termed "Front Page Extensions." More or less you doubled the space it would have normally taken on the web server. It was very inefficient and bloated. However, I like many more, followed the FP movement in hopes that it would someday be fixed like its cousin, MS Word. The "gotcha" happened with one particular version of FP. For beginners and casual web developers the gotchas didn't matter. To those more experienced and manually coding, it was a nightmare. Basically when you couldn't get the program to create the type of page you wanted, you did it manually. That was all well and good until the new versions of FP came along. We then found (without MS telling us) that when you saved a page with some of your own code (called, 'hand coded' or 'hard coded') this nifty little program would change it. It would change it to the "default" way FP wanted the page formatted. To make matters worse it was likely a web developer would have hundred of pages that already existed with manual code from previous versions. We left FP in droves. FP is a different animal today than it was back then since MS is continually improving things. However, for us old guys we only need to be bit by that animal one good time to never want it back as a pet. I can't recall where I went from there, but eventually I came across Dreamweaver (DW). I don't like Macromedia's solutions in other areas except for Flash. Like so many, I use Adobe for graphic solutions. And just like someone else reviewed here, DW doesn't add or change things. While on this DW bandwagon, I tried a number of other upcoming products such as Adobe's GoLive and ColdFusion but still came back to DW. Enough of the history, but I thought it was important since so many of us followed a very similar path. DW does a lot of things good. The 'what you see is what you get' really isn't all that important since it is so easy to "preview" your pages quickly in the browser of your choice. I could go on for hours of details but I'll just give you a few examples. I like to make "frame" sites. It still has a stigma from way in the past since IE didn't support them right and they were so difficult to make. Basically you will know you are on a frame site if you have a menu, that when an item is selected, the entire page does not refresh or display again. In other words the menu area will not even flicker in the slightest when you click on a menu item and load another page. To you, when you go to a frames site, you just see one page. However, in reality, you are looking at "at least" two pages all on one screen and have loaded three files in your browser. Most likely it will be three pages and four files loaded. After having to explain that, I'll get to my point... Manually it is difficult to have a "mouse-over" event on one page frame that changes the graphics in another frame. It becomes a nightmare to maintain that manually over a period of time. Besides the code you are usually dealing with 4 graphics, 2 of which are animated graphics. So with 4 menu items, you might have 16 graphics to keep track of and be sure the code points to the right files and pages. With DW it is easy. You can have a mouseover event on a menu frame, have it load another graphic (probably animated) on the same item your mouse is over, PLUS, have it load a different graphic in another frame. You really just have to use your imagination why and when you'd use such behavior but I can tell you that there are a lot of different cool things that you can do with that behavior. Also DW makes "pre-loading" graphics very easy. Unprofessional pages will only load the alternate mouseover event 'when' the mouseover occurs. By default DW does it automatically, plus you can have it preload a ton of other graphics and even entire pages. This makes a more professional loading website. All is not good in paradise however... DW makes it easy to incorporate Flash into your web pages. Too many beginners that start with DW use Flash for menu items and various other uses that are impracticable, take up bandwidth, require a plug-in (although typically already there), and generally make a convoluted mess of how a page should be done. All I can say to new users is not to rely too heavily on Flash solutions unless you really understand Flash.

Rating 4.6 ::you can make some really cool websites with this and it has alot of options! I have not yet discovered all of them! The key things I found interesting were: CSS (cascadoing style sheet sets)/DHTML/Java/Frames/ASP/Coldfusion/ASP.net apps/JSP/PHP and more! you can do all this within dreamweaver! I find that to be good one stop website app.The only gripe is that it can be RAM/CPU cycle hungry. I recommend running win2000/XP (or on linux with most of the vutual machine/win-Lin environments aval.) with more than 128MB RAM/ 750+MHZ PIII/AMD duron/atlon Processor and 16MB Video memory for graphic intensive websites.

Can't get much better if you want a WYSIWYG web editor. I use it for most of my webpages because it doesn't put in worthless codes and is so easy to use.