The Web Development Workflow

The Macromedia Studio 8 products—Dreamweaver 8, Fireworks 8, Flash 8, Contribute 3, and FlashPaper 2—work in concert to provide the best design and application development environment for web designers and developers. Here's how Studio 8 provides the right solution throughout each stage of the web development process.

Planning a website

Before developing a website, establish its goals, determine its audience, and identify data source requirements. Then, begin mapping the site navigation. The graphics tools in Fireworks 8 make it easy to quickly create a site map illustrating how the web pages will relate to each other. Once the idea has been sketched, it's easy to convert the drawings to HTML pages with the one-step publish HTML feature in Fireworks. With drawings available as HTML, the pages can be posted to an internal site by Dreamweaver for easy access and presentation to the team.

Setting up a development environment

Setting up a web server, a development server, and a Dreamweaver site is next. Once web and applications servers are set up, define a website using the simple web site setup wizard in Dreamweaver, including local and remote storage locations for site documents. Set up the check in / check out capability in Dreamweaver to ensure that no two people are working on the same file at the same time. Sites defined in Dreamweaver can be shared with Fireworks and Contribute for seamless integrated workflows.

Planning page and screen design/layout

Use the professional design tools in Fireworks to comp a site's main pages and to create graphics. Add buttons, mouseovers, and pop-up menus without writing any code. Edit and optimize photos. Export an entire page to Dreamweaver, or slice up a page and export only selected sections, including graphics and HTML or use the Fireworks comp as a tracing image in Dreamweaver.

Creating content assets

Use the combined visual and code environment in Dreamweaver to build web pages. After creating bitmap and vectors graphics, such as buttons and rollovers in Fireworks and rich-media elements in Flash, integrate the assets into HTML in Dreamweaver. The seamless integration between Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks offers features like launch and edit for instant access to source files.

Building application assets

Frequently accessed or updated information on a website is likely to be stored in a database and pushed live with a web application server. Studio 8 supports creation of HTML-based web applications with Dreamweaver or Flash-based web applications that take advantage of the rich client capabilities of Flash Player, a database is likely required to store the information the website will deliver to users. Dreamweaver enables creating dynamic pages that support ColdFusion, ASP.NET, ASP, JSP, and PHP technologies to connect to datasources. Create application interfaces in Flash and integrate them directly with a database.

Assembling, testing, and deploying

When all the website pieces are ready, put them together in Dreamweaver. Special features for testing and validating designs ease this final production phase. Commands in Dreamweaver and Macromedia Flash ensure every site meets accessibility standards. Finally, when the site is good to go, use Dreamweaver to deploy it to a server.

Maintaining and updating

Take advantage of Dreamweaver templates to define styles and standards for sites, and then allow non-technical contributors to update their content with Contribute. Set administration rules within Contribute, including setting permissions and workflow approval requirements. Content providers can easily update and edit content keeping the integrity of the site intact.

Learn more about working with Dreamweaver and Contribute ›