Attention
Captivation
This is a training package that will hold your attention
extremely well. Because Ms. Warner has a speaking and training
style that’s easy to understand, you already feel
connected with her as she instructs. That combined with
the tight pacing of the series make sure that you stay alert
and interested. The only time where I really got a bit overwhelmed
and started to glaze over was during the Perl-Scripting
Tip, but there’s just no way to make custom tweaking
a Perl-script into a ball of fun. If you watch that piece
in two sittings, though, there’s no boredom issue.
Reusability
Whether you’re an old dyed-in-the-wool web designer
or someone who’s just trying to make a compelling
site to advertise your film, you’ll be pulling this
set out time and again to make sure you’re getting
the most out of your site designs in Dreamweaver.
The focus on .css is a powerful one and really helps you
unleash some serious design magic on your page, while the
focus on multimedia integration and Behaviors allows you
to pull your audience into your page. You will definitely refer back to this training and watch it again from time to time. And with the
usual Total Training functionality which allows bookmarking
of important sections, it’s extremely easy to do this.
The
only downside for reusability (or usability) is,
like previous Total Training sets, it does have issues with
stuttering playback from time to time. While the manufacturer points out that this should only happen with multiple programs running or if you are working with an under-powered machine, I found this happened from time to time on my 3 Ghz P4 with a gig of
RAM (which is more than quadruple the program's hardware requirements) with no other programs running other than Total Training and Dreamweaver 8. However, these issues usually
go away if you just pause and unpause the playback. (Unless
you’ve left the playback paused for an inordinate
amount of time. As a last resort in these situations, you may need to quit and restart the application.)
Value
vs. Cost
While the first training set was a great value for teaching
you how to use Dreamweaver to create some nice sites, this
set is an awesome value for showing you the powerful design
techniques to make your sites really soar. This set gets
into more of the concepts of layout and helps you think
outside of the box, developing the necessary combination
of multimedia elements and solid web functionality to help
get your film or production company noticed! As such, this
is a set that, while it costs $150, is worth every penny!
Overall
Comment
Total Training for Advanced Dreamweaver 8 really is a must
own product if you are going to be the one designing the
website for your film or your production company. (And,
if you’re not, make sure the person who is doing the
site has gone through this training!) With over 100 million
websites out there, there are a lot of folks who think they
can design a website. Professional training like this can
be the difference between your site standing out from the
pack and just blurring into the background.
