After a few years of (I must admit) pure laziness, I finally started to work on a new set of Dreamweaver CS3 video tutorials.

… But, to be fair to myself, I wasn’t in a hurry to upgrade my Dreamweaver MX videos since the differences between CS3 and MX are really minimal … most of the changes are ‘under the hood’.

What is new about Dreamweaver CS3?

Dreamweaver CS3 is Adobe’s first official release of the software (Adobe just bought Macromedia) and so Dreamweaver CS3 now has the Adobe look and feel that is consistent across all their products including, Photoshop CS3, Illustrator CS3 etc …

Beyond that, the following things stand out:

• Better CSS support.
• Better FTP and site management tools.
• Ajax support with the Spry framework.

… There’s more for sure, but those are the things that stand out for me.

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A common question I get from people, is whether it makes sense to go to college to learn web design?

I’ve talked about the web design profession in other articles. Yet, as you will see in the following email I recently got, I haven’t dealt with all the issues regarding web design and education:

Hi Stefan,

Anyway, I am interested in web design. I am in the middle of trying to figure out whether I should go to my local community colleges for courses in HTML, photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc … or an actual art school for graphic art/ web design. Of course cost is a factor.

I am a mother of two, and my work schedule needs to be flexible. I am very creative and have a great eye for design.

My question is, which course of action you recommend? How much education is necessary? Is a degree necessary, if so, what type? associate, bachelors, certificate?

What are the salary potentials in web design working for yourself and for outside companies (I have research outside company positions advertising 40k – 50k, is that realistic?)

I’m not young, (a youthful 44) and I really need to do something in the form of a career for myself, other than taking care of everyone else.

Thank you so much for your time-

Sandy

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