Does anyone have a doubt that the web is a very different animal then it was ten years ago, five years ago, two years ago?
Campus has changed quite a bit in that time – just look around at the new buildings, new roads, new football coach…again. But you are still struggling with Dreamweaver and Contribute, then you are doing it wrong.
Dreamweaver was a great tool back in the day. It helped us build lots of sites but it’s not the answer now. We’ve grown up, moved along and now we take the web very seriously – as the university should – and we don’t offer any Dreamweaver help (except to get you out of it) and we dislike dealing with Contribute tremendously.
So why should you get out of Dreamweaver?
- Dreamweaver doesn’t build clean code. The code that it dumps into your website slows the user down. Why do that? Conductor and WordPress have much better code and it’s updated all the time to make it better.
- Dreamweaver is local to your machine – not the internet. If you’ve got to edit your site, you have to use the computer that has Dreamweaver. Conductor and WordPress are web-based content management tools. You can log on from any machine, anywhere in the world (with an internet connection).
- Dreamweaver is too open on design. Are you a professional web designer? Did you take web usability classes? How do you know that your users will be able to navigate the site and understand what you are trying to get across to them or do what you want them to do? We are professionals here at AgencyND. We build sites every day. We learn new things every day. We keep up on the latest design trends every day. We also combine this knowledge with marketing and advertising every day. The university pays us to do this. We want to share this knowledge with you and help you out. Are you really saving money by doing it yourself?
- Dreamweaver is tied to Contribute keys. If you have lost your key and have had to have a new one generated, you can understand how much fun this is.
- Dreamweaver is not industry standard in the real world. If you get a job or career with a business that is using Dreamweaver to run its website, then I would suggest looking for a new job. Dreamweaver is not something that companies that are serious about the web use. They use content management systems like Conductor to run their websites.
Do you have any reasons you would like to add here?
We have two solutions for getting onto the web in a profession and easy to use way. One costs a little money and other is FREE.
Conductor.nd.edu is our web content management system. It is easy to use and easy to set up. You can have a website in less than three days that you can start putting content in. If you want a custom website, it can do that as well. Pricing is between $5K – $25K depending on how much customization we need to do. It can do just about anything.
Blogs.nd.edu is our FREE solution. You can have a live website in usually a day. You can customize it yourself as well. It uses the WordPress MU system and it’s easy to learn. Wordpress is the largest blogging platform in the world so it’s not going away anytime soon. Also there’s lots of free help out there on its website.
Stop using Dreamweaver and upgrade to current web solutions.
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