After reading a recent Roadmap Series guide to web success, it occurred to me that I’ve been using Dreamweaver professionally for a very, very long time. The Web Assist article stated that “2009 is a big 10th anniversary year for Dreamweaver…” Ten years? Can’t be. I searched my personal timeline.
Actually it has been LONGER! I then realized that in December 1997, I was at the Jacob Javits Center in New York for Internet World. Macromedia first launched Dreamweaver v 1.0! I remember standing around the Macromedia booth with a few hundred other people, while the presenters described the WYSIWYG editor. “The what? What did he say?” Ews and ahhhhs came from the audience as they described “round-trip HTML”. Designers could now spend more time being creative and less time thinking about HTML. This visual HTML editor would allow a novice like me to create source code?
At that moment you could look at the attendees faces. This was going to change our lives.
At the time, I was working for Bankers Trust as an Art Director. I was given the opportunity to design the bank’s intranet. Back then, I knew zed about HTML. But my boss had faith in me! She even gave me my first Visual Quickstart Guide to HTML which was release in 1996. “Read this book. We just need an intranet…” she said.
Imagine now, a huge Fortune 100 corporation, simply handing over their intranet to the graphic designer? Things were easy back then. Real easy.
To prepare for my little side job of designing the bank’s intranet, I tinkered around with Pagemill. I craved understanding the principals of HTML so I diligently practiced how to hand-code in Notepad. The bank eventually purchased a copy of Dreamweaver for me and that was the beginning of the end of my life in print.
Little did I know back then that I would be able to expand my career into new media simply because of one fantastic little app!
Posted by jeanalan 
