Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    


Christian Crumlish is the author of "Dreamweaver MX / Fireworks MX Savvy," an
indispensable resource for web professionals, beginners, and people in
between.

Dreamweaver is the most popular program used to design and develop websites
today.  It runs on both Windows and Mac machines.  Fireworks is a web-
graphics tool that integrates seamlessly with Dreamweaver.  Organized
logically into sections - planning a site, assembling graphic assets,
developing pages, designing  navigation, building dynamic (database-backed)
web applications, and going live (launching and maintaining your site) -
"Dreamweaver MX / Fireworks MX Savvy" functions as both a linear tutorial and
a flexible reference.

"Dreamweaver makes it easy to develop and manage web sites without
sacrificing design sophistication," Christian writes, "giving you a visual,
graphical interface without hiding the underlying markup and code.
Dreamweaver also includes tools for testing accessibility and your sites'
appearance in numerous browsers."

Christian maintains a website for the book (http://dreamweaversavvy.com/),
where readers can obtain updates, downloads, and news, as well as ask and
answer questions and make suggestions for the next edition of this book.

He also publishes a syndicated blog channel called "Fireweaver" about web
development, information architecture, and of course Dreamweaver, Fireworks,
and other Macromedia products (at http://fireweaver.com/blog/).


Since 1998, Christian has worked part-time as a literary agent, specializing
in book projects with an Internet community or collaborative web-project
component.  He's authored more than ten books on technology, including the
best-selling "The Internet for Busy People, Fifth Edition," and co-founded
Enterzone, an experimental literary webzine ("hyper web text media zine art")
in 1994.  He also loves to sing and dance.

Our interlocutor for this discussion is Jeanne DeVoto, a 17-year Net veteran
and a longtime jaundiced observer of web design trends, and may have coined
the term "Left-Hand Index of Death." Her professional specialty is technical
documentation for programmers.  A WELL member since 1988, she has hosted
several WELL conferences, from Current Events to Hosting.
  

    
Thanks for getting us rolling, David, and welcome to the interview,
Christian!

In the olden days <creak sound effect>, we didn't have Dreamweaver and tools
like it to write with web pages; instead, we wrote HTML and Javascript
directly in text editors... in the snow... up the hill... both ways...
With the rise of sophisticated tools like Dreamweaver, what's been gained -
for web designers, and for the web as a whole? Has there been an offsetting
loss?
  

    
Howdy!

I just typed up a long preamble but your first question is better...

(for the record, it was:
I suspect this will be a slow time in the inkwell, what with
Thanksgiving coming up and all, but I'm hoping we can have a
wide-ranging discussion about designing and developing websites. I
based the structure of my book on the lifecycle of a web-development
project, from conceptual planning through launch and subsequent
maintenance. I find this approach is more useful than simply wandering
through the applications explaining what the widgets do. 

My aim is to give an overview of the process and show readers how to
use the software to automate what can be automated, lock down what
needs to be locked down, and efficiently build out anything from a
personal website designed by an individual to a robust dynamic web
application built in collaboration with a large multidisciplinary
team.)
  

    
Great question: "With the rise of sophisticated tools like
Dreamweaver, what's been gained - for web designers, and for the web as
a whole? Has there been an offsetting loss?"

I guess in some ways the gains are obvious. When you and I started
building websites, you had to hand-code everything. To this day, many
people pride themselves on working this way, and criticize the adoption
of tools like Dreamweaver because of the way the whizzy interface
hides the code and enables people to create websites without
understanding the underlying markup...

but, the fact remains that without shortcuts, this work can be tedious
as hell. When we didn't have fancy schmancy tools like Dreamweaver, we
at least used tricks like making templates and reusing them for
similar pages, and things like that.

To my mind, tools like Dreamweaver and Fireworks mainly help by
automating certain processes and keeping track of others. For instance,
in the old days, if you reorganized the structure of a website, you'd
have to hunt down all the internal links and make sure that they were
fixed to point to the new, correct paths. Dreamweaver notices where the
links are pointing and when you move a file it updates any references
to the moved page (after checking with you first).

But aside from shops that are completely standardized on Dreamweaver
(or, gopod forbid, FrontPage), very few developers spend all their time
working inside one application. I still do a lot of handcoding, for
example, but I find it useful to set up all of my active sites in
Dreamweaver if only for the automated FTP and synchronization between
my local server and the remote hosting site.

I'm getting longwinded here, but to answer the second half of your
question, what's lost when there's a total reliance on something like
Dreamweaver is an understanding of how the Web works. There is also the
risk of perpetuating bad or inefficient design decisions because the
software makes them for you.

For example, the people who promote Web standards (such as the fine
folks of http://webstandards.org/) have worked with Macromedia to get
it to support CSS (cascading style sheets), and the support is
improving, but out of the box Dreamweaver still encourages you to build
your page designs out of nested tables and to apply deprecated "FONT"
tags to your copy to format the text.

So, yes, there is a risk of losing a certain degree of control or
finesse, though I think it's offset by the benefits: not just the
shortcuts and reusable library-of-assets concept, but also the ability
to create a site template and hand it over to someone else to build
out. There are a lot of great collaboration features in Dreamweaver now
that make working in teams much easier.
  

    

Off-WELL readers are invited to send comments or questions to inkwell-
hosts@well.com
  

    

I am about as far from a web wizard as you can be and still have a computer
on your desk (or lap), but I do have a web page and I sorta know how to get
some information up there.  But keeping it interesting seems like a major
challenge.

Can you talk a little about the difference between designing/implementing a
web site and maintaining it as a living, breathing (and interesting) thing?
  

    
I think that this persistent interactive medium that we currently call
the web is still so new that most of us don't really yet grasp its
full dynamic. I'm not talking about the Internet's full "potential"
which is huge but largely unknowable right now. I just mean that right
now very few people really get how the web swings.

What this translates into is that there are still a lot more people
who are experts at throwing a beautiful looking website onto the web
then there are people who know how to build an engaging interactive
site that doesn't immediately go stale.

For me, I've been through web publishing, web design, and now web
development, where we think of the web site as an application running
on the web as a platform. 

As the projects got more complicated, I picked up a few specialties -
content management, information architecture, user experience strategy,
user interface design, and so on, and one thing I noticed is that the
content management needs for a website are almost always overlooked
during the development and initial launch. At best, it's usually folded
into the general site admin (such as adding users, security, etc.). 

Inevitably, a site goes live and after a little while the people who
have to really live with the site (on the backend side, that is) day in
and day out realize that it's a royal pain to update just about
anything. That's when you end up retrofitting some kind of custom
content-management interface.

Ideally, I like to consider the people supplying the content for the
site as one of the user audiences and develop the backend maintenance
interface in the same way that the front end is developed for the
paying customers or members or readers or whatever.

More on this later...  I need to make dinner while my partner makes
pie dough for a few pies she's baking tomorrow morning.
  

    
(for "then there are" in paragraph 2 above, please read "than there
are" instead)
  

    
It's interesting that you mention the bifurcation between the people who
create the content of a site and the people who make it work technically...
it seems to me this, like the tools that let us insulate ourselves from the
gory details of HTML, is another change that comes with pluses and minuses.
There was something special about having sites that came in their entirety
from someone's creative vision... but on the other hand, no one can deny
that most creative people really, really don't want to get up to their
elbows in code. (Or, for that matter, site design and architecture.)

With most sites these days being developed by teams of people filling
different roles, is there still room for the small personal site built by a
single person? There will always be small sites for friends and family, and
simple sites that present static information on a specialized topic (and
don't need a lot of bells and whistles to do it). But are there individual
website creators these days who are doing new things with the web -
technically and creatively? Or will we see innovation coming mostly from
teams of specialists from now on? Is there still a place for the generalist?
  

    
hi christian,
if i'm still a little slow with dreamweaver, will upgrading to MX help me or
give me more things to stumble over?
  

    
answering out of order.... (sd), i think each version of dreamweaver
has been a huge improvement over the last. when i first saw the program
(around version 1.2 or 2.0), the concept was there but the execution
was kind of weak. I think Adobe SiteMill was the state of the art in
web design and site management then, 

In the meantime, though Dreamweaver has come a long way. I still
handcode a lot of my pages and templates, but I use DMX to manage all
my sites (keep track of the FTP information and the link relationships)
and I'm very happy with it for that.

I'll get to Jeanne's question next, plus I'm still thinking about
David's question.

Eat lots of food today!
  

    
Hi Christian,

As a designer with basic coding skills, I find Dreamweaver MX to be a
really great tool. I have found that I am fascinated by functions like
searchable databases, etc. How hard do you think it would be for an art
dweeb like myself to get a handle on this and maybe implement these
functions in Dreamweaver MX. I assume they are covered in your book?

Thanks!
Don

p.s. - Left navs. Functionally they are kind of cumbersome for right
handed people. When I worked at seattletimes.com we experimented with
right hand navs and extensive top navs, but found that for sites with
extensive content (news sites in particular), our users preferred left
hand navs, presumably because we always read left to right and users
are used to seeing the nav there.
  

    
Hey Don!  Thanks forjoining us!
  

    
I got the book.  Thanks!  I'm new to Dreamweaver and I'll open it and design
some pages before I jump in here.  But I'll be listening.
  

    
(Hope everyone's having a great Thanksgiving.)
  

    
I have a bunch of Front Page (shudder) enabled websites that I would
like to move over to Dreamweaver for management, are there any gotchas
to doing this?  Can they be managed concurrently with both Frontpage
and Dreamweaver or will this lead to problems.  I have a community of
authors who depend on me for web space and guidance as to tools for
authoring and managing their websites.  And I am planning on rolling
out Dreamweaver to them as I get to know it better.
  

    
I see two Frontpage references in your index, the first is to page 213
and is in the HTML setup box where you choose Frontpage HTML as
opposed to Dreamweaver HTML (I guess this is Fireworks specific).  So
I'll check this.  Then on page 587 there's a reference to something
called the Frontpage Migration Kit, which sounds like it let's you use
Frontpage reports from within Dreamweaver?  
  

    
Hi David!
Great Topic - Thanks!
  

    
First of all, let me apologize for neglecting this topic just as it's
starting to hop. I plead overindulgence at the groaning t-giving
table(s)...

So, I'll try to catch up now. Please forgive me for posting a number
of replies sequentially.

Re (jdevoto)'s question in (8), you write "There was something special
about having sites that came in their entirety from someone's creative
vision... but on the other hand, no one can deny that most creative
people really, really don't want to get up to their elbows in code.
(Or, for that matter, site design and architecture.)"

I agree with both sides of this. The web has been a great medium for
multitalented impresarios, and some of the best sites still emerge from
a single person's vision. But it's not just that designers may not
like to write code or that engineers may not have the aesthetic
training or skills to do beautiful designs. There is also the issue of
content versus design. Some graphic designers are good writers and vice
versa, but it's sort of unrealistic to expect people to excell in
every aspect of a multimedia format. 

Myself, I come primarily from the writer's perspective, and I dabble
in artwork (sketching, painting, computer stuff) in my spare time, but
I really don't seem to have the best design chops (or I don't know
enough tricks),so I really like collaborating with people whose primary
skills are in that area. In return I offer to write copy for them or
rationalize their information taxonomy or something like that.

Jeanne asks, "With most sites these days being developed by teams of
people filling different roles, is there still room for the small
personal site built by a single person?"

And I say yes, absolutely. I still think the web is an ideal personal
medium and hugely flexible in that sense. I may not want a single
person to develop an e-commerce site for me or some dynamic
application, but just look at blogs, which are almost always designed,
written, published, and maintained by a single person. These are
currently some of the most popular sites on the net.

Personally, I think blog software packages and Dreamweaver share
something in common: they help automate part of the web development or
maintenance process, freeing people up to focus on humane skills and
leaving the tedious repetitive i-dotting and t-crossing to the
machines. Not to get too far afield, but I was wondering recently if it
might be cool to have a blog conference here on the Well. Should I
start blog.ind?

Jeanne goes on, "... But are there individual website creators these
days who are doing new things with the web - technically and
creatively? Or will we see innovation coming mostly from
teams of specialists from now on? Is there still a place for the
generalist?"

Watch me talk out of both sides of my mouth: Yes, and yes. 

As I said, I still think the web is the perfect medium for the auteur
or impresario. Think of people like Derek Powazek, who combine art,
design, community-building, and writing skills all in one person. I
think generalists will always be drawn to the web. On the other hand, I
think even generalists tend to have a sweet spot or comfort zone, and
it's always going to be true that you can accomplish more ambitious
endeavors by collaborating with teams of people. In my own work, I've
been trying to get better at working with multidisciplinary teams,
which partly involves learning to let go of total control of all
aspects of a project.

On the third hand, I continue to have these skunkworks/drawing-board
type projects I'm always fiddling with where I'm very slowly doing all
the work myself, if only because they are not commercial (or at least
not immediately or obviously so), and there's no real incentive for
anyone else to expend their energy helping me get these things
launched.

One thing I should probably do is list those projects publicly and see
if anyone wants to step in and fill some of the gaps that I am less
well equipped to handle myself. For example, my dreamweaversavvy.com
website could really use a non-crappy design!
  

    
also, still following up (sd)'s question in (9), one way to evaluate
DMX is to download it and try it for free for 30 days. I believe the
URL for that is http://macromedia.com/dreamweaver/download/ (and the
addresses for Fireworks MX, Flash MX, etc. are formed analogously).

We also give away the trial versions of these programs on the CD in
the back of my book, again so people can get started even if they
haven't decided for sure to buy in or upgrade.
  

    
re (pasewark)'s question in (11), first of all permit me to gush as a
fan for a moment: Don, I've been an admirer of your artwork and design
for some time now, so it's a pleasure to have you here!

Anyway, you ask, "How hard do you think it would be for an art dweeb
like myself to get a handle on this and maybe implement these functions
in Dreamweaver MX. I assume they are covered in your book?"

First of all, I'm not surprised that you like Dreamweaver. I think
that while it tries to appeal to people coming from various background
bringing various skillsets to the table, it has always been first and
foremost a designer's tool, trying to bring a kind of Photoshop
interface and design approach to web development. 

It's usually the hardcore coders I encounter who find DMX to be too
much of a crutch and prefer to do without the wysiwyg interface.

These same people might argue that the code DMX writes for you is not
optimized or is some other way clunky. Usually when you have software
writing code this comes with the territory, because it has to fit as
many context as possible. But definitely you can use Dreamweaver to
build database-backed web apps, make them searchable, password-protect
sites, and build other kinds of dynamic, interactive interfaces.

Macromedia used to have a separate product called Dreamweaver UltraDev
that had all of the database and web-application features, but with
this MX version they've combined that with the basic product. While
experienced programmers will always prefer to write their own scripts
by hand, DMX makes it possible for people without those hardcore skills
to pull together dynamic interfaces more-or-less automatically.

You can build and populate a database in DMX and then build a front
end for querying the database and displaying the results. Most
applications are really just custom databases with an interface in
front for putting information in or getting it out.

Dreamweaver also "speaks" a number of different popular server-side
scripting languages (ASP, JSP, PHP), so you can use it with existing
dynamic sites or develop with whatever technology is available on your
server side.

For example, I have Dreamweaver running under OS X on my Mac, and I
have PHP and mySQL going along with the Apache web server that comes
with. This means that I can build and test database applications all
just on my Mac, and then when they are ready, I can publish them out to
my Linux server (hosted by a friend in New York), which also runs
Apache, PHP, and mySQL. I find that pretty cool.

As for left navs, I had never noticed that issue of lefty vs. righty
before. I'm a lefty myself, which might be why. That upside-down
L-shaped design really took over, at least among commercial sites, at
some point. One problem with that is that unless you are using CSS for
your layout and are creative about the order of the DIV's, people using
nongraphical browsers will end up having to wade through a lot of
navigation cruft before gettting to the juicy content on the page. 

My http://radiofreeblogistan.com/ blog uses a sidebar down the
right-hand side of the page, although I can't really remember why I
decided to go with that. 

You say "...our users preferred left-hand navs, presumably because we
always read left to right and users are used to seeing the nav there."

This could also be just because people had become familiar with the
layout. In a sense, users get trained to expect certain interface
elements and get disoriented when they are absent. Website developers,
especially information architects and user-experience people often way
overestimate how transparent the interface is. Most users have a very
narrow concept of what they're looking and few can recreate the
hierarchical navigation tree for a site, even one they are very familar
with.

For example, can anyone easily describe how the content at The Onion
is organized? I read it every week and I'm not sure I can.
  

    
In (15) and (16), (terry) discusses MS Frontpage: "I have a bunch of
Front Page (shudder) enabled websites that I would like to move over to
Dreamweaver for management, are there any gotchas to doing this?"

First of all, I hear you. I wrote a book about FrontPage 2000 a few
years back and that program is or at least was at the time quite a
mess, and clearly a sort of trojan horse designed to get people hooked
on Microsoft server extensions and custom codes. On the other hand, I
shouldn't complain, because it seems that hardly anybody upgraded to FP
2002 and so I still get the occasional residual royalty check from
that book, despite the fact that the publisher (not the publisher of my
Dreamweaver book, fwiw) abandoned the series a few years ago.

terry asks, "Can they be managed concurrently with both Frontpage and
Dreamweaver or will this lead to problems?"

Now this depends on how you used Frontpage and whether you built your
sites so that they depend on Frontpage server extensions. If so, it
will be difficult to convert entirely to Dreamweaver, at least not
without reengineering whatever dynamic features you build in FP so that
they work with more universal technologies, such as PHP.

terry goes on: "I have a community of authors who depend on me for web
space and guidance as to tools for authoring and managing their
websites.  And I am planning on rolling out Dreamweaver to them as I
get to know it better."

Actually, Macromedia recently announced a new product called
Contribute that is designed to make it easier for content-providers to
add content to existing websites (whether built in Dreamweaver or not,
but of course it's optimized for working with Dreamweaver) without
having to deal with the underlying code. What's useful about this is
that you can "lock down" certain areas on the page and limit the
sections that can be edited. This product works with static pages,
though, not database-driven sites.

It would be very expensive to hand out Dreamweaver to a bunch of users
(at $399 a pop). One reason why so many business rely on FrontPage as
the end-user web-content tool is that they havealready invested in
Office and they have that application available for free. Macromedia
Contribute will supposedly go for $99 a seat.

(terry) then checks my index for FP refs and says, " the first is to
page 213 and is in the HTML setup box where you choose Frontpage HTML
as opposed to Dreamweaver HTML (I guess this is Fireworks specific)."

Right. Although Fireworks is clearly optimized to interact with
Dreamweaver, it can be used to build pages that will be edited in other
packages. For those who are unfamiliar with the product line,
Fireworks is a kind of limited Photoshop-type graphics programs
specially designed for creating, optimizing, and cutting up web
graphics. My book covers both Fireworks and Dreamweaver, because
creating and gathering graphical assets is an important part of the web
development process.

(terry) also asks, "Then on page 587 there's a reference to something
called the Frontpage Migration Kit, which sounds like it let's you use
Frontpage reports from within Dreamweaver?"

That's right. Another thing I like is that Dreamweaver can clean up
the HTML markup generated by Microsoft products. It has a feature for
cleaning up Word HTML (which is famously encrufted with all kinds of
proprietary version of XML tags as well as deprecated formatting tags),
and you can download an extension that does the same thing for the
spaghetti code Frontpage generates.

The whole thing with extensions is pretty cool, too. Dreamweaver's
interface is largely built out of XML and Javascript, so it's
remarkably hackable. Macromedia encourages users to develop and share
extensions to the software (some of which, naturally, they will
incorporate in future versions if they prove popular enough). They even
certify extensions that meet their standards and host an exchange site
where you can search for and download these inventions or upload your
own.
  

    
Another question I have is about building forms, I have both FP2000 and DW
MX as options.  Which do you feel has superior form building capabilities,
or do you recommend another tool?
  

    
Hi Christian,

Wow. Thanks for the kind words! My own web site has been down for
almost 3 years. I need to get it togther soon. I just moved to the bay
area and I'll need my web site when I go job hunting. I think I need to
wrap my mind around this database stuff before I mess with it. To me,
creating an Excel database is a challenge. Although I'm not all that
interested in doing heavy duty stuff, I like to understand how things
work to the point that I can create dynamic pages with a simple
database. Perhaps like a tapelist? heh, heh. I'll have to place an
order on Amazon tomorrow . . .
  

    
Christian, the book has a web site (as mentioned above -
<http://www.dreamweaversavvy.com/>). How has that worked out for you? Have
you seen a lot of hits on the site? Do you think it's brought sales of the
book, or is it more in the way of an additional resource for readers?

I had a tech book out in 1994, and I did write a page for it a couple of
years later, but at the time it came out, having a web page for a book was
pretty much unheard-of. But it's common now, at least for computer-related
books. Do you think the web's changing how tech books are marketed and
presented? With the web's ease of updating, will we see computer books
presented online, or does the printed doorstopper have a long life ahead of
it?
  

    
Profuse apologies for my delay in responding to the last round of
questions! I had a minor project fire to put out and then yesterday
brought a last-minute ticket to the Other Ones show over at the Kaiser
(which I'll probably post about elsewhere on the Well...).

Catching up now...