Joe wants his website updated so he calls the office to find out about our services. He wants to be able to maintain his site on his own. So far so good. Then he asks if he should buy Dreamweaver.

I tell him no.

It turns out that he already purchased the program and has attempted to use it to design his own site – with typical results.

Joe has found that both Dreamweaver, in particular, and web design in general are a bit more complicated than he imagined. No surprise there.

In talking with him it became clear that Joe has fallen prey to the more, bigger, better bug. He used the word ‘best’ often to justify his purchase. He asked around and found out that Dreamweaver is the “best” web design program and had to own it.

I’m not knocking Dreamweaver. It is a very good program. For professional web designers. Unfortunately it is complex and comes with a pretty steep learning curve. For a pro, the time spent learning the program is just part of the job. And the learning curve is less steep because pros should already understand HTML and CSS and how the parts of a web page fit together with the site as a whole. We are building on a (hopefully) solid foundation, not having to learn Dreamweaver and web design at the same time.

Using a Mac isn’t any real help either, not when it comes to Dreamweaver. Big and complex are big and complex on any platform.

Of course Dreamweaver isn’t the only overkill program that people purchase then never learn how to use. How many copies of Photoshop fill up hard drives, but are used only to resize photos. How many copies of Excel are used only to make simple lists? How may copies of Word are never pushed beyond formatting a letter?

But we have to own the “best”, don’t we?

In the majority of cases something simple would be easier to use, adequate for our needs, and much less expensive. But where are the bragging rights in owning less than the “best.” We are not talking practicality here but vanity, and vanity is a powerful motivator.

For all practical purposes a Timex watch is the functional equivalent of a Rolex, which costs a hundred times more, but where is the status in owning a Timex? And a Rolex works the same way as any other watch so there is no learning involved. It simply costs more to own , so is therefor “better,” but isn’t harder to operate.

But the “best” software is typically much, much more complicated than consumer software. It is designed for professionals who spend years learning their chops, and who know a lot more of the technical aspects of their craft than just the software.

In Joe’s case, he will probably have to be satisfied with owning Dreamweaver and using a Content Management System (CMS) that we set up for him. Then he can be happy knowing that he used the “best” web design firm in town. (And that his site will look and function better than anything he could have created on his own.)

The $400 he spent for Dreamweaver will just have to be marked up against the cost of “owning the best”.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.