Over the past few days I have had the curious experience of trying to create a website in Dreamweaver, and since the overall theme of this blog is to document the ins and out of learning on and with the web, my adventure seems worthy of some comment .
The circumstances were (or seemed to be) quite simple. I am teaching a course on instructional design for e-learning. The tool selected for this task was Dreamweaver and my objective was to have the students use it to create some simple learning presentations that would illustrate the content of the course. That content focuses more on the instructional requirements of web based learning sites, and not the mechanics of creating the web site itself. Yes, there is a certain interaction, but as I described it to my students, the course covers instructional design using Dreamweaver, not Dreamweaver using Instructional Design.
The students did not have an extensive background in web design, so I started them with a tutorial on Dreamweaver CS4 which I found on the Adobe site. (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/first_cs4_website_pt1.html )After working through it I thought it covered the basic concepts of creating pages with Dreamweaver well, including a good overview of the page/CSS interactions. I then started to prepare a lesson and I discovered a gaping hole.
The tutorial created the Dreamweaver menu system and showed how to branch from a home page to the various child pages that might be added to a site. It also showed how to add and delete child pages and how to format the menu system. But if I created one of those pages using the same techniques shown in the tutorial, I could not navigate back to the home page. This seemed like it should be a fundamental component of creating a web site and I would have assumed a starting point in the tutorial. It should have been a simple problem, but it wasn't.
The first thing I discovered was that the books I had, and the various internet accessible tutorials all showed the same thing – I could create pages and massage the formatting with CSS, but I could not find a tutorial that explained how to create a web site, that is, 5 pages that linked to one another, all sharing the same menu structure.
Eventually I determined that one way to do this (I'm sure there are several) involved creating pages from a template, and then making updates to the template page and allowing them to be copied thru the site. My frustration came from two sources – the first was that I had experience with several web page creation programs, i.e. NetObjects Fusion and FrontPage, and I had an expectation that there would be some built in facility to assist me in creating a site (not a page) from a template. That there was not turned out to be an idiosyncrasy of Dreamweaver and something that I would need to accept.
But the other frustration and the way I found my information is why I bring it up here.
Most of the help options redirected me to adobe's website. Many redirected me to user forums. None (that I could find) sent me to the user manual for the program. There did not seem to be a user manual. As someone who has spent a large amount of time on the phone with tech support both professionally and personally, I have become accustomed to making the first step to actually look at the manual. (This was a hard lesson to learn, but it sank in after about the 10th time some weary tech support person asked me politely if I had looked at Page127 of the manual?) Now as a good support citizen I found out that there was no manual, and they were sending me to other users. I suppose that there is some trendy Web 2.0 justification for this, but it seems like an abdication of responsibility on the part of the program authors. I wanted to go to the Index of the manual, look up "web sites….creation from template" and start there. Instead I watched some videos, read some forums, and snatched needed pieces of the puzzle from several chapters of several books.
From a learning point of view, this was constructivism in practice, and I now know a lot more about Dreamweaver, but I still feel somewhat put upon by the process I was forced to follow. I did not enjoy it. While it might be a valid business decision on the part of Adobe for an obscure or rare process or procedure, I think that building a web site should be assumed to be a fundamental desire on the part of anyone who buys the program.
This is actually a lesson in my e-learning class. Pity I did not have one of the Dreamweaver folks in there.
R
