Not gonna lie, I got by on Dreamweaver as an amateur web dev in the early 2000s. Made me some money while I was in college studying to be something else other than being a programmer.
Those GUI web layout tools were good. It made it so simple to make a webpage.
I made a site for a car workshop in Netscape Composer for like 20USD that they hosted on the ISP homesites you used to get. A friend made one for his dad's carpentry. We knew nothing about the web or programming.
The web has degenerated as a practical tool for the common man. It is programmer and SaaS lock-in nowadays.
>The web has degenerated as a practical tool for the common man. It is programmer and SaaS lock-in nowadays.
That's not really true. I can still use Notepad to create an HTML only document (remember learning HTML?), and host it on any site, and everyone can still view it on any platform. Don't even need Dreamweaver to slice an image up to do a layout in a table. Don't even need 100s of KBs of JS libraries to download to display it.
Just ignore the hype of whatever JS library is the fad darling, and go with what you know. The end user of the website probably won't care. Only other techwheenies on the internet will chide you for using such an antiquated method, and make fun of you for not being part of the cool kids.
I rather liked Dreamweaver for static sites that needed to be user-modifiable without some complicated backend. You could establish templates with clear descriptions of the content and turn it over to the end-user relativily easily. Now, I have no idea - I wouldn’t want to try and explain markdown to a church secretary.
