Look at all the options!

One of the cool things about being a web developer/designer is that there is a massive amount of tools to do our job. From editors, to photo manipulation…it is quite awesome. One of the problems I think a lot of us have though, is that we get into a rut using the same software because that is what we are used to. I should know I was one of those people. But once I switched to a new one in one category, everything opened up for me.

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Dreamweaver is NOT the most awesome thing in the world

Note: This post is more for me than you. I want to document what I’ve done, where I’ve been, and where I am going. Maybe in a year I’ll look back and say, “Damn, I was an idiot back then,” just like I do now.

I’m curious on how many of my readers use Dreamweaver. Do you solely use DW or do you use other editors/IDE’s? When I started out in the web development and design world, DW was considered the best. That was back at version 3 I believe. I still have a Dreamweaver 4 Magic book lying around here somewhere. This is back at the tale end of table use, too. Man did I seriously hate tables. But anyway, DW’s design view was how I worked. I trusted it to show me things were working correctly. Remember, I started out in print design, and everything I know I self taught, and the “community” was not what it is today. All I knew was that people made web sites using Dreamweaver.

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I was inspired, sort of…

Anyone check out the design change over at css-tricks.com? Pretty damn nice, yes? I found its cleanness inspiring. So much so in fact, that I was an hour into changing my design here up quite a bit. If you wandered over here at the time, you might have noticed some of the changes. But while I was doing these changes, which involved a lot of deleting, I suddenly stopped to think things through. I then put most of what I was taking out, right back where I had them. Again, if you happened to be here while it was happening, you would have noticed that my slider was gone. Replaced by a simple header, a small lead-in on what the The Web Machine was all about, and another h2 tag that said some silly crap that I can’t remember. Why did I put it back though?

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