Welcome to Dreamweaver
Macromedia Dreamweaver MX is a professional HTML editor for designing, coding, and developing websites, web pages, and web applications. Whether you enjoy the control of hand-coding HTML or prefer to work in a visual editing environment, Dreamweaver provides you with helpful tools to enhance your web creation experience.

The visual editing features in Dreamweaver let you quickly create pages without writing a line of code. You can view all your site elements or assets and drag them from an easy-to-use panel directly into a document. You can streamline your development workflow by creating and editing images in Macromedia Fireworks, then importing them directly into Dreamweaver, or by adding Macromedia Flash objects you create directly in Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver also includes many coding-related tools and features, including code editing tools in the Code view (such as code coloring and tag completion); reference material on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, CFML, ASP, and JSP; and a JavaScript Debugger. Macromedia Roundtrip HTML technology imports your hand-coded HTML documents without reformatting the code; you can then choose to reformat code with your preferred formatting style.

And Dreamweaver now incorporates and expands on all of the capabilities from Macromedia UltraDev, helping you to build dynamic database-backed web applications using server languages such as ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), JSP, and PHP.

Dreamweaver is fully customizable. You can create your own objects and commands, modify keyboard shortcuts, and even write JavaScript code to extend Dreamweaver capabilities with new behaviors, Property inspectors, and site reports.

This chapter contains the following sections:

Learning Dreamweaver

Website creation workflow

Where to start

Typographical conventions

What’s new in Dreamweaver MX