Postscript on Why I'm Not Using Dreamweaver

[jducoeur]

Do you remember, a month or so ago, when I was grousing about how horrifically bad the website for the Adobe MAX conference was? I had let that slide once the conference started, because the show itself was really quite well-organized and a lot of fun. So I figured they were just having an off day.

Well, today I got a followup email from Adobe, asking me to take a brief survey on what I thought of the conference. Great, think I: a chance to point out the flaws in the website. Yeah, nice theory. The link to the survey page takes me to a blank screen, and then hangs. It's not temporary, either -- I've tried twice, several hours apart.

These folks really need to learn that this isn't exactly a good advertisement for their tools. I mean, my principal reaction is that I want to learn what Adobe systems they used to build this site, and then *never* use those systems. Rarely have I seen a nominally professional website that was so hosed...

Comments

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

Dreamweaver is great. The GoLive! product that they had some ten years ago is flippin' horrific. It didn't render tables properly, it used some sort of relative positioning grid system. Which works fine for designers, but when I'd try to go into the page code to edit it, I was totally confused because it wasn't standard HTML and ended up rewriting the whole damn thing.

I'd be more likely to blame ColdFusion than Dreamweaver, actually.

[siderea]

Well, if anyone is going to be bashing CF, I want in on the action. But I don't think one gets to blame CF for this -- it's not like CF automagically does anything, much less poorly. It's just a programming language. A very, very slow, interpreted language with retarded regular expressions and a completely non-standard definition of "variable scope".

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

Good point.

It's just that Dreamweaver *does* do things automagically, and actually does them pretty well. Fireworks, too; I used both a lot when I was coding webpages at TMP Worldwide.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Not that it helps them look better, but have you tried a variety of web browsers? I'm tired of pointing out how many web sites don't render with anything but IE6.

[jducoeur]

This *was* in IE6, so that excuse doesn't wash...

[asim.livejournal.com]

The link to the survey page takes me to a blank screen, and then hangs. It's not temporary, either -- I've tried twice, several hours apart.

I wouldn't hit 'em quite yet. A goodly number of companies outsource such surveys, simply because "real" surveying is not something most companies wish to pay employess to do (esp. with the need to hire people who actually know stats...)

[jducoeur]

Could be. But y'know, if you're running a conference telling me all about how good your tools are for producing magnificent websites, letting someone run the conference website this badly is just plain dumb...