Silicon Beach Training Blog » Dreamweaver Training

Adobe Muse – The New Dreamweaver?

Andy Trainer — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 09:01:18 +0000

Adobe Muse

Well well well - it seems that Adobe can’t stop releasing previews and betas at the moment!

We recently saw the unveiling of Adobe Edge – a potential future replacement for Flash which creates animations using HTML5. You might like to check out my summary of Adobe Edge (and my atrocious attempt at an animation).

Then last week, they also lifted the lid on Adobe Muse. Muse is a “code name” – so we wait with baited breath to see what the final product will be called. Adobe is currently “working with the branding team to determine the final name of this product” (perhaps the developers are fans of the Devon rock band of the same name!)

Whatever it ends up being called – Muse is a web design tool that allows designers without any coding experience to create website designs and publish them without having to look at any HTML. It’s a What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) tool.

Hang on a minute though! Adobe already has the industry standard WYSIWYG web design tool on its books in the shape of Dreamweaver – which has been around for a LONG time (we’ve been running web design training since 1999 and our Dreamweaver course was the first Silicon Beach Training ever offered!)

Dreamweaver was originally released in the age of static HTML pages – and has had to reinvent itself over the years to keep up in the age of dynamic database driven websites. It hasn’t done a bad job of that, and remains a very useful design tool and code editor (Dreamweaver CS5.5 also includes tools for mobile authoring – which is the biggest growth area in web design at the moment). But – to use Dreamweaver effectively to produce dynamic sites which include blogs, social integration etc… (all of which are really important now), increasingly requires more coding experience.

This is where blog and web design CMS systems like WordPress and Joomla have come in to their own in recent years. Via simple interfaces and easy to use plugins, these tools allow people with genuinely NO programming experience to set up sites with interaction and social integration. They are theme based, and don’t have as much flexibility in terms of layout design as Dreamweaver – but nevertheless can deliver professional results.

So who is Adobe Muse for, and what can it do?

Adobe Muse’s strapline is “Create websites as easily as you create layouts for print” – so it’s clear that this product is aimed squarely at print designers who want to build websites (the tool was created by the team behind InDesign)

We’ve downloaded the beta, and the interface will certainly be familiar to all you Photoshop and InDesign users out there:

Click image for full-size version

OK – so far so good – Muse is a kind of “Dreamweaver lite” with a more designer-friendly interface. I had a quick play, and without having to follow any tutorials quickly made a very simple 4-page site using a master page.

Muse also has a simple “publish” function (rather than an FTP client like Dreamweaver), which allows you to either export your site in HTML format locally, or to publish directly to the web via a “Business Catalyst” account. Including this ‘instant 1-click publish to the web’ functionality seems to indicate that Muse wants to compete with CMS systems like WordPress et al… and fill a gap in the market for designers who want to be able to realise their design vision without having to employ a web designer or learn how to customise WordPress themes.

Will Adobe Muse Succeed?

There’s undoubtedly a demand for this sort of product – but how will it shape up against the other options?

WordPress is brilliant and simple to use – but doesn’t allow flexibility in terms of designing the ‘look and feel’ of a site unless you can build custom templates (which requires programming knowledge).

Dreamweaver has lots of functionality and allows more design flexibility, but doesn’t allow the simple addition of interactive features like blogs, user commenting and social integration using plugins.

Muse will be a welcome addition for anyone who’s ever designed a website layout in Photoshop and then thought – “how do I turn this in to a website”!

BUT

(and its a big but!)

Muse currently has NO facility to add user interaction (blogs & comments) OR social integration (Facebook, Twitter & Google+ share buttons etc…)

Now – it’s early days – this is a beta version and you would expect Adobe are going to add a lot more functionality to the product. But on current evidence, Muse is going to be a tool that builds static HTML pages – and we’re really not sure if that’s going to cut the mustard in the current market.

We’ll keep following Muse’s progress – we’d love to hear your thoughts too – comment below!

Using Dreamweaver CS5 with Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.

Heather Buckley — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 13:26:33 +0000

Why you should upgrade to Dreamweaver CS5?

The best updates in Dreamweaver CS5 are the development tools for dynamic sites built using PHP-based content management systems like Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.

Using Dreamweaver CS5 with Joomla, WordPress and Drupal

Silicon Beach Training provide a great 2 day Dreamweaver Training course in Brighton, Sussex, as well as WordPress Training, Designing custom Templates in WordPress, Joomla Training, CSS training, in fact everything a web developer could need. See our full range of Web Design Training.

There is a general shift in business sites towards content management systems because of the growing popularity of blogs and community sites so this is a welcome addition. These CMS’s (Content Management Systems) don’t create static HTML files, most of the pages on a WordPress blog or a Drupal site are generated using templates and include files. This made it impossible previously for Dreamweaver to render previews of the pages. Dreamweaver CS5 now gives you tools to design templates and see what your layout will look like in your final design. Using the built-in WebKit engine Dreamweaver CS5 now renders your page as it would render in WordPress (or whatever PHP-based CMS system you’re using).

Dreamweaver CS5 can now identify and establish the relationship between the pages created in WordPress, Joomla!, or Drupal based Web sites and their dependant files. This makes finding what file you needed to edit and making a specific change much easier.

The addition of new inspection tools in Dreamweaver CS5 let you make adjustments to the CSS or the DOM of pages and see them rendered in real time. The inspector shows you how your code will change as you interact with dynamic elements on a page, and it will show you how various changes you make to stylesheets show up on the rendered page.

There is extra support for PHP with new code hints for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, with support for custom functions and classes, so you can even create your own code hints and error highlights for other PHP frameworks.

Added support for WordPress and other like-minded CMS tools is a big improvement, and one that’s necessary since so much of web publishing has moved to PHP-based systems. If you have a joomla, WordPress or Drupal site you should test out Dreamweaver CS5 and see if it helps to make designing templates easier.

Win Free Training – Twitter Retweet Competition NOW CLOSED!

Heather Buckley — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 15:12:40 +0000

CLOSED CLOSED CLOSED!

win free training

You could enter our current photo competition though – click here

Want a free place on one of our public training courses? Fancy something creative for example our Photoshop Training Course in Brighton, Sussex, or Dreamweaver Training, something practical like Time Management Training or brush up on something more technical like VBA for Excel Training. A full list of public courses can be found on our training dates page (only courses with a maximum duration of two days can be claimed as your prize)

Enter our simple retweet competition on Twitter to be in with a chance!

It’s Really Easy to Enter

The only thing you have to do is -

1) Follow @SBTTraining

2) Retweet our competition invite on twitter.

RT: Win Free Training – @SBTTraining is giving it away! Visit http://bit.ly/2sCAJh for more info! #SBTweet
(click on this for an easy retweet)

Just make sure your tweet contains our Twitter name (@SBTTraining so we can track you as a contestant) and a link to this blog post (of which http://bit.ly/2sCAJh is a short version) and include the hashtag #SBTweet

We will DM the winner so make sure you follow us @SBTTraining.

That’s all you have to do. See? Entering is very easy!

Don’t have a Twitter Account?

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service. It allows you to send short messages 140 characters in length, called “tweets”, to your friends, or “followers.” You can find more information about Twitter (and how it works) here.

Signing up is very easy and only takes a few seconds.

How do we decide the Winner?

On Monday 13th December 2010 at 12.00 GMT we will randomly select one winner from everybody who sent a Tweet according to the guidelines above.

We will announce the winner via Twitter the same day (so we highly suggest you follow us) and will contact the winner through DM . The winner will be able to select any of our public scheduled courses based in Brighton up to 2-days in length.

The winner will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation costs.

What’s the Catch?

There is no catch. We’re not after your email address or phone number.

Terms of Service

In order to participate, you must have a Twitter account, and have accepted the Terms of Service of Twitter. Members from every part of the world can enter the contest.

In order to participate, you must send a valid Twitter message. A valid Twitter message, or tweet, contains our Twitter name (@SBTTraining, so we can track you as a contestant), and a link to this contest page (of which http://bit.ly/2sCAJh is a short version)

We will DM the winner so make sure you follow us @SBTTraining.

The winner will be randomly selected from all valid tweets.

On the Monday 13th December, we will reveal which Twitter member has won the Training Course.

The winner will be able to select any of our public scheduled courses based in Brighton up to 2-days in length.The winner will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation costs. Booking is subject to availability and our usual Terms and Conditions

Top iPhone and Android Apps for managing your Blog or Website

Heather Buckley — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:10:19 +0000

Smart phones are getting smarter thanks to the deluge of Apps available. Sometimes though there are so many it can help to have someone else sort out the wheat form the chaff. So here we are, we’ve complied a list of the best iPhone and Android Apps for people who want to update their website or blog on the go so you no longer have to be sitting in front of your computer to upload, manage, publish and monitor your website.

WordPress

wordpress application for iphone and android

Top of the list of course is WordPress. If you have a WordPress blog, this app allows you to manage comments, upload images, and write, edit and publish posts from your phone. Both these apps are free and are can be downloaded from WordPress.org.

If you have an iPhone see the left screen in the image, you can use location sharing to give your blog posts added context.

The Android version (see the right screen in the image) is good for smaller screens.

Download WordPress for iPhone and Android

iPhone: WordPress for iOS

Android: WordPress for Android

If you need help setting up a WordPress site we offer WordPress Training courses in Brighton and Advanced WordPress training for those who wish to learn how to create templates for wordpress and integrate their blog into their existing site. To learn to create Templates and Websites we offer Dreamweaver Training and Web Design courses as well as Photoshop for Web Graphics.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics for iPhone and Android Phones

Now you can track your web stats wherever you are by downloading a Google Analytics apps onto your phone.

There are several free and paid for options for both iPhone and Android users. The free ones may have all you need but it you are an SEO addict you may need something stronger!

iPhone: for a not free but really comprehensive Google Analytics app for the iPhone try Analytics App. If you’re looking for a free Google Ananlytics App for iPhone try Blast’s Google Analytics app.

Android: Droid Analytics is one of the most popular choices and is so cheap you may as well buy it (a free trial is also available).

If you need help installing and understanding Google Analytics we provide regular Google Analytics courses here in Brighton, we even provide Advanced Google Analytics Training for the really geeky.

Web Browsers

Web browser for android and iphone

Opera Mini for iPhone:

Opera Mini is a good alternative to Safari, the features are much the same for both the iphone app and the android app to read below for more info.

Opera Mini for Android:

Opera Mini is also available on Android, and has the benefit of lightweight browsing and homepage bookmark links.

The user interface in Opera Mini is much more usable than Android’s rather clunky browser. The speed dial feature lets you set up on-click shortcuts to up-to nine of your favorite sites. Mini supports tabbed browsing, meaning you can switch between the different pages you have open very quickly and easily.

There is also an auto-complete feature in the address bar, and a built-in search bar. Unfortunately this search bar only supports Google and is not customizable with other search engines.

Page load times are good, thanks to Opera’s server-side rendering technology.

There’s support for bookmarks and browser history, too.

Online File Management

download dropbox app

Dropbox for iPhone and Andriod

Dropbox is a brilliant tool for uploading, downloading, sharing and syncing files online. The Dropbox app comes in both Android and iPhone flavours. It’s simply amazing and what’s more it’s free.

The free Dropbox application for iPhone, iPad, and Android lets you:

Store all you documents in one place to be accessed anywhere
Browse the files in your Dropbox folder easily
Open images and other media directly through the app
Upload photos to all of your computers at once
Share links to your files over email
Export files to other apps

It does loads more definitely worth checking out.

You’ll need a Dropbox account, but it’s free to sign up.

iPhone: Dropbox for iPhone

Android: Dropbox for Android

In case you didn’t know we don’t just offer techie stuff . We also provide InDesign Training, Management Training and Leadership Training courses. Come down to Brighton!

Email Marketing using Dreamweaver

Heather Buckley — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 08:57:40 +0000

How to Create Email Templates using Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver’s template feature makes it really easy to adapt existing HTML email designs to suit your brand with minimum time and effort. Email Marketing is enjoying a bit of a renaissance at the moment as people are more being selective about whom they wish to receive promotional materiel from. Keep your emails relevant and well designed and they can be an extremely effective sales tool and a way of interacting with your customers.

To learn more about the effectiveness of Email Marketing you could enrol on one of our Email Marketing Training in Brighton, Sussex.

Simply download a free email template from one of the many available on-line, just type in Free Email Templates into Goolge, this one is a good start. If you know dreamweaver already and a bit about design you could design one yourself (See our Dreamweaver Training course if you need some help) . We are going to show you how to create the template not how to design it, if you need help with web design we offer a great Web Design Week here in Brighton which includes Photoshop Training for the web.
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Open up one of the templates (HTML file) that you have downloaded in Dreamweaver.
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Create an Editable Region by selecting the areas of text or images that you will need to change for each email/newsletter.
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Go to “Insert”> “Template Objects” > “Editable Region.” (or CTRL + ALT + V) Give the new Editable Region a sensible name and hit “OK.” - repeat for everything you want to be able to change later.
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Go to “File” > “Save as Template” and give your template a name
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Close your template.
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Open a new HTML file in Dreamweaver.
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Choose ”File”> “Modify”> ”Templates” and select the template you have just created.
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Change the text and images in the Editable Regions.
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Choose “File”> “Save”> give the HTML file a unique name and hit “Save.”
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If you need to change any areas that are non editable you will need to open up the original template file and make edits to the areas that are not selected as an “Editable Region.”
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Choose “File” > “Save All.” Don’t forget to update all files based on this template by hitting ”Update.”
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You html email should be good to go and you can change it whenever you wish.

Twitter Competition – A Fairytale Winner!

Andy Trainer — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:07:55 +0000

Nadine was delighted to win our Twitter Re-Tweet competition!

At the end of last year we had a fantastic response to our Twitter Re-Tweet competition – the prize was a free place on any of our public training courses.

Our lucky winner was Nadine Burzler (@NadineBurzler) who works at Cactus Language Worldwide.

Nadine was delighted to win the competition and has chosen a free place on our 2-day Dreamweaver course as her prize. She also chose to extend this to come on the whole Web Design Week package, which includes our Web Design training and Web Graphics Photoshop Course.

When she told us why, we realised that there couldn’t have been a more worthy winner…

Nadine has been planning to move to Mexico to live with her boyfriend, and was actually in Mexico visiting him when she was chosen at random as our winner.

Nadine had been planning for a while to arrange some Web Design training in Brighton, Sussex, so that she could still earn a living once she’s moved abroad. She told how she felt when she had won…

“I was ecstatic and so happy that life was giving me the tools to fulfill my dreams… little did I know 2-3 months ago what I wanted to do or how I was going to make a living in Mexico of all places and now, thanks to re-tweeting, twitter and SBT I will be taking a one-week course and embark on a journey of independence, learning how to create my own e-commerce website and generate an income from home, being with the man I love.”

We’re looking forward to seeing Nadine for her training in March – and we’re really happy this will help her so much with her plans!

We’ll be announcing more competitions where you can win free training soon – so keep your eyes peeled on the Competitions category of this Blog.

Reared to go I got back to the UK 2 weeks ago, completely focused and ready to find a course so I could start my online business selling one of a kind handbag to boutiques and retail stores in the UK

Will WordPress Kill Dreamweaver? We say NO!

Andy Trainer — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:39:43 +0000

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!

Joomla vs WordPress comparison

Heather Buckley — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:43:28 +0000

Joomla is growing in popularity as an out of the box free CMS tool. It is becoming so popular in fact we have just launched a new Joomla Training course in addition to our popular WordPress Training course (we also offer a one day course on Social Networking and course on Blogging). Should we all be thinking of abandoning WordPress and jumping on the Joomla bandwagon? That depends on what you want, what you are capable of and if you will be maintaining your own site.

Should I use Joomla or WordPress?

This article will show the pros and cons of each tool so that you can make an educated choice.

WordPress

WordPress is a really great blog creation tool. It makes simple tasks really easy like adding images, making pages and posts, managing comments etc. Installing it, running it, and publishing basic content with it is quick and simple. It is efficient and allows easy optimising for maximum search engine ranking (blog searchbots, ping /trackback/tag capability etc)

Joomla

Joomla, is geared towards portals and content management. It is extremely powerful and has much more capability than wordpress. It’s also much easier to go wrong with Joomla if you don’t know what you are doing. It demands more technical knowledge. If you want an image library or an extensive ecommerce site however you are going to need something more powerful than wordpress for the job. Joomla comes into it’s own when you require it to work with a custom database.

Joomla Advantages

More versatile
More types of components, modules like:
- Article directories
- Good for large E Commerce sites
- Image libraries
- Multiple user privileges
- Custom databases

Joomla Disadvantages

More complicated
More difficult to fix when things go wrong
Needs more technical knowledge

WordPress Pros

Easier to maintain
Simpler for blogging
WordPress brilliant user experience

WordPress Disadvantages

More limited in application
Less scalable
Less scalable E commerce solution

Joomla V WordPress Conclusion

If you have a small to medium size business and will be managing your site in house then WordPress is currently your best open source (free) option to manage and update your website on a daily basis, tasks are very easy to accomplish. WordPress has an amazing community around it and good documentation so fixing things, it’s easy to add plugins for just about anything and there is great support documentation. You can add on E commerce solutions see WP e-Commerce plugin for WordPress.

The main reason for choosing Joomla is it’s power and flexibility. The capabilities of Joomla are endless. If you need something for a large organisation or community Joomla has a complex multiple user privilege system. For multiple user groups Joomla is the best system, users can login and view different content that is user privilege dependent. There are Ecommerce modules and Image Libraries available. Joomla like WordPress has an amazing community based around it, but documentation is less easy to find and follow.

Anyone with technical know how might prefer Joomla, but for the average client WordPress is far easier to handle.

Using both WordPress and Joomla!

It is possible to use them both, just to confuse you. If you were a developer this is quite a good option as wordpress is still the best blogging freeware around. It is possible to create a great all singing and dancing site with Joomla and integrate a wordpress blog just for the blogging side of things. This is now possible with new third party applications see here.

Amendment 25th Nov 2009

Thanks Marcia Cole for your comment, Pods are indeed a very exciting development allowing customisation of databases for WordPresss. You would need some developer experience to make the most of these, however, you would need at least that much experience to use joomla with customised databases.

There are many off the shelf, customisable themes available and Woothemes are one of the best and most competitively priced. These are great if you are developing a new site.

So the answer to your question is yes in my opinion WordPress may well be leaving all of its nearest competitors behind.

Update – 2nd Dec 2009

We’ve had a great quote from Tanel Raja in a discussion we’ve started on the LinkedIn WordPress Group – “I think that WordPress is C in CMS while Joomla is M. One is about content and other is about management”

We think that sums it up nicely Tanel!