We’ve been providing Dreamweaver Training since it’s first release in 1997 and in that time we’ve seen Dreamweaver evolve to support a wide range of new scripting languages and functionality requirements as they’ve come to prominence.

Since the rise of Web 2.0 and, in particular, the increase in popularity of social networking, the ways we design, build and interact with websites have changed considerably. More and more websites now contain blogs, forums, polls and a host of other ways in which users can interact and generate their own content. We now offer a one day Social Media training course.

Programming this sort of functionality from scratch isn’t easy for beginners, and this has led to the rise in popularity of Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress and Joomla, which allow those with little or no programming knowledge to manage social sites and blogs effectively. To meet this demand we now offer WordPress Training and Joomla Training. These open source tools are free and user friendly, leading some to suggest that WordPress could replace Dreamweaver altogether.

Here at Silicon Beach we’ve certainly seen a rise in demand for Joomla Training and WordPress Training (as well as Blogging) and the results from Google Trends below show the rise in searches for WordPress, compared to the slight decrease in searches for Dreamweaver:

However – what is interesting is that we haven’t seen a marked a drop in interest in Dreamweaver training – which you would expect if what the Dreamweaver nay-sayers maintaned was true. Whilst the graphs above show that searches for WordPress have shot up, searches for Dreamweaver have not declined at anything like the same rate.

Whilst WordPress and Joomla can provide a great solution for users on a small (or zero) budget to get a blog or web-site up and running, their functionality alone can only take you so far. Companies or individuals who want websites that require unique, custom built design features and functionality will still develop sites from scratch, and a large number of those sites are still being built with Dreamweaver.

There has been much praise for the increased customisation available in terms of design and functionality in WordPress, which has played no small part in it’s popularity. However bloggers and web-designers who want to go beyond the standard themes, templates and widgets will need to develop their own templates, and this will require a tool like Dreamweaver.

Many are choosing to use Dreamweaver to create WordPress themes and Dreamweaver Extensions like ThemeDreamer are available to make doing this more accessible for non-programmers.

We use WordPress to manage this blog and our Free Resources section, and speaking from experience there are often times when WordPress alone won’t do what we need it to and we turn to Dreamweaver. We wouldn’t have been able to integrate this Blog so seamlessly in to our site if it wasn’t for Dreamweaver.

In our view – far from being replaced by CMS’s like Joomla and WordPress, Dreamweaver has continued to evolve to exist alongside these tools and done a good job of remaining the What You See Is What You Get (or WYSIWYG) tool for web designers – including beginners who don’t want  learn to be programmers.

Do you use DreamWeaver alongside WordPress or Joomla? Do you have another preferred tool? Fell free to comment – let us know your thoughts!

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Blogging Training, Content Management System, course, Creating WordPress Themes with Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver Training, Dreamweaver v WordPress, Dreamweaver vs WordPress, html training, Joomla Training, social media, Social Networking, training, Using Dreamweaver with WordPress, WordPress Training

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