Stand Out Blogger -

After last posting about looking forward to the arrive of Dreamweaver CS5 and the ‘Content Management System (CMS) Framework’ and having a few days to play around with it and start to get a good basic understanding of how it works. From what I have seen there are people who will really benefit from the new features – and others who won’t. So in an attempt to save some bloggers a lot of money here’s my list of:

2 Types Of People Who Won’t Benefit From Dreamweaver CMS Framework

1. Blogger’s Who Don’t Want To Design WordPress Themes

A lot of bloggers are quite happy with their free or premium theme, and that is totally fine. If you have no interest in designing WordPress themes then it goes without saying that the new Dreamweaver CMS Framework will be of no benefit.

2. Bloggers Who Don’t Have Moderate Coding Knowledge

One of the reasons I was so excited about the new CMS framework feature of Dreamweaver was because while I have moderate knowledge of CSS styling – I really can only edit code and create basic code. By allowing me to see the changes I make in real time I knew this would improve my coding skills and help me create much better themes in a shorter time period than in previous versions of Dreamweaver.

If you have no CSS coding knowledge then I think you will really struggle doing anything more than changing colours as you are still working with the CSS stylesheet. So I would recommend that you do a bit of CSS studying before you spend the money to buy Dreamweaver.

What I Love About The CMS Framework…

Live Code Navigator

I absolutely love how you can split your screen between a pages html or the Stylesheet and a live preview – and you can right-click on any section of the live preview and select ‘Code Navigator‘ and it will show you which section of the CSS to edit.

Live WordPress Theme Preview

After a bit of time struggling to set up XAMPP and install a test version of WordPress onto my computer I was happy to get it all runnning and this feature makes it feel like I am editing my theme live through Firefox!  It is amazing.

How Dreamweaver CS5 Is Working For Me

I took the opportunity to test out the new design features to see if I could design some new WordPress themes for a couple of my blogs and I though I would share the results.

**NOTE**
Both these designs are still a work in progress and I know there is still work to do on both. This is just an example to show what an average blogger, with average design and coding skills can accomplish with Dreamweaver.

WordPress Theme 1: DIY SEO Services

This design is for one of my local Australian blogs that’s focus is on teaching local small business how they can conduct their own SEO services and save money. It is still in it’s infancy but is starting to get some good search rankings and I think will do really well with the new design and an upcoming free e-course.

WordPress Theme 2: Secret Marketing Success

SecretMarketingSuccess.com is all about teaching people the art of outsourcing jobs overseas and is really starting to see an increase of in traffic, this is why I wanted to update the theme to put a much greater focus on the content above the fold.

I am really happy with where this new design is heading. With a major focus on the free ebook, I think this will dramatically increase conversion (I’ve already had my first subscriber through the header form). While the home page is still a bit messy, I think this theme should convert extremely well.

With both themes I now need to spend a bit of time nutting out the text css, especially the in post formatting – but I think you will agree that it is a pretty good start!