Macromedia Dreamweaver
DreamWeaver is cross-platform compatible with Mac or Windows and is the tool of choice for most professional web site designers.
A Solution to the Learning Curve
DreamWeaver MX has "feature bloat" and will appear overwhelming at first.
Adobe has developed Contribute for beginners and occasional web site maintainers.
Contribute is especially recommended for site owners who maintain sites created with DreamWeaver, because Contribute understands templates and compontents created in Dreamweaver.
Download a trial version of Adobe Dreamweaver
Learn more about Adobe Contribute
Using DreamWeaver with a Previously Existing Web Site
If you already have an existing site, import it from the host with DreamWeaver as follows:
- Site > New Site
- Define Local Information (a place to store your site on your hard drive: see below)
- Define Remote Information (the ftp address for your site: see below)
- Use Site Synchronize (or drag files) to accomplish the download.
Dreamweaver Local Setting (reduced from actual size):
Dreamweaver Remote Setting (reduced from actual size):

More on DreamWeaver with Previously Existing Sites
Generally, we recommend performing site maintenance with the same authoring tool that was used to create a site. This is because the various tools have different methods for creating reusable web site objects, such as HTML snippets, navigation schemes and so forth.
You can use DreamWeaver with any site, but you may need to do more work when the site was not originally designed with DreamWeaver, especially if you want to use the more powerful library and component features that DreamWeaver provides.