A Beginner's Guide to Adobe Dreamweaver CC

Adobe Dreamweaver CC is a popular visual development tool for designing, publishing and managing websites. It offers a lot of power and flexibility for both designers and developers. Dreamweaver's many features make it intimidating for beginners, but Adobe's onboarding experience is designed to help people new to the program get started. The software's advanced features make it possible to go from beginning web designer to professional in a short period. Because Dreamweaver is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) software, you can opt to design visually or with code. 

Dreamweaver CC is both a WYSIWYG editor and code editor for Windows PCs and Macs. You can use it to write HTML, CSS, JSP, XML, PHP, JavaScript, and other coding languages. It can read WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal templates, and it includes a grid system to do grid-based responsive layouts for three device sizes at once, which is an enormous timesaver for developers who work on sites for desktop, tablet, and cell phone browsers. Dreamweaver offers plenty of tools for mobile web development including creating native apps for iOS and Android devices. There's no shortage of things you can do with Dreamweaver.

Before you write code, Dreamweaver encourages users to understand the different design techniques necessary when displaying content across mobile phones, tablets, and desktop browsers. Developers who work on websites for both computers and mobile platforms can preview their sites on multiple devices at the same time to see the effects of their page edits in real time. 

Adobe offers a robust selection of tutorials for Dreamweaver for either beginner or experienced users. Beginner video tutorials — many with sample files for practice— include:

• See what you can do with Dreamweaver
• Understand the anatomy of a website
• Follow the stages of web design
• Define page structure with HTML
• Lay out and style web pages with CSS
• Publish and manage websites
• Responsive web design basics
• Preview in browsers and on mobile devices
• Code HTML, CSS and JavaScript faster

In addition to these tutorials (and many others), Adobe hosts a Dreamweaver beginners forum.

Dreamweaver CC is available only by subscription as part of Adobe Creative Cloud on a monthly or annual plan. You can opt to subscribe only to Dreamweaver using a monthly or annual plan. The plans include the most current version of the software, 100GB of cloud storage for your files, your own portfolio website, premium fonts, and social media tools. Dreamweaver is also available as part of an All Apps subscription that includes more than 20 apps including Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, and Adobe XD CC.

Adobe offers a seven-day free trial of Dreamweaver. No credit card is required.

Dreamweaver is mature software. Adobe regularly adds advanced features and updates Dreamweaver's interface. Recent improvements include:

• Bootstrap 4.0.0
• Support for multi-monitors (Windows)
• Support for HiDPI displays
• Device preview
• Live view
• PHP 7 support
• GIT support enhancements
• Improved find and replace
• Improved code editor with Emmet support
• Responsive design
• Extract with batch export
• 64-bit architecture
• Starter templates
• Live guides
• Live view property inspector
• Certificate support
• Site management
• Quicker HTML5 element insertion
• Adobe Edge web fonts
• Visual CSS editor
• Developer workspace
• Real-time browser preview
• Intelligent coding assistance
• Integrated CMS support