Church IT – Supporting ministry with IT » 2010

28 Mar

Dreamweaver first, and only, impressions

Posted by TimSmith in Software, Web. No Comments

Why was I throwing myself at the mercy of Adobe’s automated ‘help’ last week?

Well I’ve been helping out moving the church website I used to administer over to a new design and platform. Joomla was just too capable for the parish and was putting people off. Myself included, trying to sort out both sections and categories for a relatively simple site became quite a headache.

Anyway, given the current situation a static website seemed the best plan with Dreamweaver the editor in use. I use Microsoft Expression Web myself so I sorted out the template first and then had a go at transferring it over.

To my delight it worked very well. The template file, .dwt, was opened without any comment and we got started creating pages very quickly.

Dreamweaver was pretty impressive just in some basic editing over a couple of hours, hence I considered the change. It’s a shame there’s no crossgrade path from Expression Web, £400 is just too much to make it a possible buy.

24 Mar

Adobe Live Chat automated? I think probably so

Posted by TimSmith in Web. 1 Comment

I can’t be sure, but I think Adobe’s Live Chat is automated. What follows should have been a simple request. Or so I thought….

Welcome to Adobe! You are now chatting with ‘Perkins’
Perkins: Hello, how can I help you?
you: hi, are there upgrades for dreamweaver from competiting products?
specifically ms expression web?
Perkins: I’d be glad to help you with that information.
Perkins: Do you have any previous version of Dreamweaver?
you: no
you: I’m using ms expression web and would like to move to dreamweaver
Perkins: Are you there with me in chatting?
Perkins: As we are from Adobe Retail Sales Chat, I recommend you to
buy Adobe Dreamweaver, which is a good competitor for all other Web
Design products.
Perkins: Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 is a web development tool that lets
users design, develop, and maintain websites using visual editor or by
coding directly.
Perkins: You can create and maintain basic websites to dynamic,
advanced applications that support best practices and the latest web
standards and technologies.
Perkins: We recommend the purchase of Adobe software on our web site.
Perkins: Because, there are many advantages of buying the software on Adobe.com
Perkins: Most importantly, you can be sure that you’re getting
authorized software from us.
you: yes, but is ms expression web a qualifying upgrade / crossgrade product?
Perkins: No, from MS Expression Web there is not upgrade path.
Perkins: What kinds of tasks would you like the software to help you
accomplish?