When I made the decision to start an online marketing company, I had to make a decision on a web development platform. I had been using Microsoft Frontpage, which had run its course many years ago. At the time, I believed my choices were Microsoft Expression Web and Adobe Dreamweaver. WordPress wasn’t on my radar at that time. So after several weeks of comparing the two development tools, I settled on Dreamweaver. Yes it is expensive and yes there is a steep learning curve, but the program deserves its reputation as an industry leader.
Then a few months ago I started reading about WordPress and how much flexibility it has for both a blogging platform and as a website development platform. The more I read the more impressed I became. You can pretty much build any type of website you want with WordPress, and once it’s built anyone with a little basic WordPress training can add content. And they don’t have to buy expensive software or pay for expensive enterprise solutions to maintain their site.
So I started thinking that maybe I had made the wrong decision. Maybe I should have put all of my time and energy into learning WordPress. Then I came across another post on this same topic. The person who made the post pointed out that if you’re a developer working with templates, which I am, then Dreamweaver is the way to go. Why? Because Dreamweaver has been around a lot longer and there are more niche type templates available than there are WordPress themes. But this gap is narrowing.
As I got further into what WordPress can do, I learned that the folks at Adobe know what they’re doing. Rather than pan their competitor, they added features to Dreamweaver to help developers work with WordPress, greatly simplyifying the development process.
So what’s the answer to the question of Dreamweaver vs WordPress? The answer is to offer the customer whichever platform is going work best for them. If they come across a great Dreamweaver template and say that’s what I want. Then I’ll build them a Dreamweaver site. If they say they want the ability to maintain their site and be able to add content easily and cheaply, then I might suggest Wordpress. And if they aren’t sure, then I have another solution. I can offer them a Dreamweaver site with an integrated blog. The site you’re reading this post on is an example of an integrated Dreamweaver/Wordpress site.
Update:
After working with both platforms over the past several months, I have decided to use WordPress exclusively as my development platform. Here are just a few of the reasons why: great interface for both users and developers; large and growing number of themes; inexpensive premium plugins; non-programmers can add, update, and modify content without special software; lots of support options; built in blog functionality; ease with which you can integrate social media; site wide search capability; and the ability to expand the site indefinitely using categories and archives.
Update 2:
This post continues to get a lot of traffic, suggesting that I’m not the only one who faced this dilemma. So I thought that I would correct a few things I said in the original post. First, the site you are reading this post on is not a Dreamweaver site with an integrated WordPress blog. That was the case when I wrote the post, but subsequently I have switched everything over to WordPress and work with WordPress exclusively. Also, I mentioned that Adobe has integrated WordPress capabilities into their latest versions, insinuating that you could use both. While that is true, you definitely do not need Dreamweaver to work with WordPress. In fact, it only gets in the way. The only exception is if you plan to design WordPress themes. If that’s not you, then skip Dreamwever altogether.
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