Coding & scripting forum: Learning pure html vs using dreamweaver

Dreamweaver accommodates two types of people:
1.) Those who want to drag-and-drop elements, such as images, into place, use "insert table" options to automate the process, select colors from color pallets, et cetera.
2.) Those who want to dig into the HTML for more hands-on coding.

The downsides to using the former option are:
1.) The generated code is often less efficient than it could be, though better than a new web developer's early attempts.
2.) Dreamweaver and similar applications often do not support the full power of web development technologies.
3.) If you wanted to take web development to the next level, such as webpages that pull information from a database or otherwise change dynamically (without manually changing the content in the HTML), you'd have to go back and learn the HTML and CSS basics.

For your purposes, the downsides are not that significant, so using Dreamweaver's 'assisted' approach is sufficient. Dreamweaver does, however, let you switch views, so you can see the 'assisted' view, the code view, or both at once. Thus, once you learn the basics of using Dreamweaver, you could use the combined view to see what HTML is generated when you do what you've learned, essentially teaching yourself what you'd be learning in the other class. You'd just have the luxury of charging yourself what you think is a fair price.

Hope this helps,
John