Yes, have used Dreamweaver for a long time and love it. It has such wide support for so many technologies and features (CSS, PHP, ColdFusion etc) which many others do not that you can do basically anything within it. Though, I do not believe it is the simplest by a long shot for an inexperienced web designed who just wants simple WYSIWYG editing.

 

:iagree:

Dreamweaver, great software which I found to be pretty intuitive from the word go - the learning curve isn't too steep and the more you look into what it can do you'll realise it's packed with features that you actually can USE!

The only complaint I'd level at it is the ftp could be better - best go with a 3rd party app for that.

Also, the way Dreamweaver integrates with Fireworks is fantastic.

Actually, having said all that I haven't upgraded my edition since Studio MX (which is quite a long time ago...!) since then Macromedia had been bought out by Adobe, but I imagine that will only have been a good thing...?

 

Yep, Adobe taking over has been good - well, it at least hasn't been bad. I'm currently using Dreamweaver CS2 and it is much improved over MX2004 imo.

And yes, MS Visual Web Developer is part of their free Visual Studio Express suite, and is very good - I've been using 2005 (haven't installed the 2008 beta yet) but I can't seem to get it to play nicely with a MYSQL database - typically, it prefers MSSQL (and that may well be simply that I haven't tried hard enough to make it work, I'm sure it's something very basic). And a few other nitty points. But it is an amazing free web suite imo.