Dreamweaver is often considered as a competitor to Front Page, but actually there is no comparison between the two. Dreamweaver is widely used by professional web designers, as opposed to FrontPage which is never used to design a professional site. In fact, Dreamweaver leads the market with more than 80% of the users making a use of it.

Developers of Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver is a part of the Macromedia Studio. Macromedia is also the developer of Flash Player and Editor, as well as Fireworks graphics editor and Freehand drawing program. Their softwares are very popular with the designers, but they are now being used by the non-experts as well.

No Messing With Codes
In cases where either you have written some of the coding for the site yourself, or you are editing a previously designed template, there is no need for you to worry that Dreamweaver will re-write the entire thing and break the code. Most of it is left unaltered by Dreamweaver, unless you specifically instruct it to do so. Due to this reason, Dreamweaver is considered to be the best software for working with HTML templates. In fact, most of the templates that you buy would already be provided in  Dreamweaver's format.

Standards
In the earlier versions of Dreamweaver, the produced codes were not up to the standards. They did not validate with most of the browsers. However, the codes produced with the newer versions validate with most of the browsers. Also, it comes with a built-in validator that allows you to choose the standard that you want the Dreamweaver to code with.

Dreamweaver is the first program that supports visual XHTML editing. It allows you to make your document 'XHTML Compliant' while creating a new page. This feature has also increased Dreamweaver's market share.

CSS, Javascript and PHP
Dreamweaver makes it easy to edit not just HTML, but also other things that go along with it. Dreamweaver has a Javascript library, that makes it very easy to apply CSS styles to the web page. In fact, the latest version allows the users to make interfaces to MySQL database using PHP, without the need for any programming. This allows the users to create a simple database-driven website even without learning PHP.

Books About Dreamweaver
To learn about Dreamweaver and to get the best out of it, there are a number of available good books, such as:

* Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004: This is Macromedia's official Dreamweaver guide.

* Beginning Dreamweaver MX: It is a tutorial book following the development of three very different websites using Dreamweaver.

* Visual QuickStart Guides: It is a reference book to learn any specific information related to Dreamweaver.