Birnam Designs Blog -- sharing tips, resources, ideas, and more on web development and design

In the last eight years, I have made lots of advances with my web development. I am always learning new methods, new tools, and new strategies on the path to intelligent web development. These are tips I’ve learned from my progress so far.

(Inspired by the Graphic Push article “The Path to Intelligent HTML“)

Tools

Text Editors - NO

I know. I’m being mentally slapped by hard-core programmers all over the world. So let me explain. I would be perfectly comfortable coding websites in a text editor. I don’t have a problem with that. In fact, even though I use Dreamweaver and GoLive to develop webpages, I almost exclusively rely on their code editors, and only occassionally use their WYSIWYG interfaces. I started off using text editors because I believed - and still believe - that a full understanding of the actual HTML/CSS/Javascript code is absolutely essential in good web development.

That said, I do recommend using an editor like Dreamweaver or GoLive, for all the built-in productivity benefits. Built-in FTP transfers. Remote versioning control. Templates. Snippets. Components. Error checking. Reference guides. Code completion. Built-in scripts. Drag and drop linking. The advantages are too numerous to list! (Incidentally, I have no preference between Dreamweaver and GoLive, although I have the feeling that Dreamweaver is going to be the one to survive the Adobe/Macromedia merger)

Professional Tools - YES

I’m not trying to say that text editors are not professional — I am a huge fan of EditPad Pro and high recommend it, and I find it very professional. Perhaps what I am trying to say is to use Specialized Tools. Even among HTML editors, Dreamweaver and GoLive just scratch the surface of a well-rounded toolset. Since I work in such a broad range of projects, I use a wide variety of tools. Photoshop is probably the most important tool in my shop. 99% of my projects start there. With Photoshop comes ImageReady - and while I feel that most of ImageReady is fluff, there are a few really good tools in it. Flash is a great tool all by itself, but I also use SWF Studio for building CDROMs. I also have to supply my Flash movies with audio and sometimes video, which require their own tools. (I use Adobe Audition and Sony Vegas.) I use Blender for 3d graphics. InDesign and Acrobat for PDF publishing. OpenOffice for document and spreadsheets. Illustrator for vector graphics. Visual Studio for application development and .NET programming. And these are just the big ones. I use dozens of tools for various smaller tasks. (Note: I hope to put up an article fairly soon that discusses my favorite tools.)

The point of a good tool isn’t just functionality, it’s higher efficiency. That’s what justifies the cost of the software. I bought Adobe Audition, for instance, after having a particularly difficult time finding proper tools for a particular set of audio editing requirements. I could do what I needed to do, but I was spending hours longer than I knew it would have taken with a good application. So I bought a copy of Audition, and it literally paid for itself in the first two weeks of using it.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2006 at 10:13 am and is filed under general information, photoshop, productivity, software, quick tips, development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.