Dreamweavin' - Comm 447

               After using Dreamweaver last semester, I must say that I found editing and utilizing HTML to be not as difficult as I initially thought it would be.  Upon first using this program I was reminded of my eighth grade career of editing layouts for my Myspace page.  All of the silly codes like “a href” or “img src” came rushing back to me as I realized that this was something I had actually taught myself a long time ago and just never really knew what I was accomplishing.  This made diving into these procedures relatively easy to follow (“always close your doors”, for example).  With this knowledge I was able to make it through Comm 352 with virtually no serious problems, and the entire class was relatively painless.  It was nice to experience something so meticulous that could lead to such simple results.
               After what we learned today in class, however, I realize that there is still much for me to learn!  Having only inserted codes manually to every page in Comm 352, I’ve become used to this tedious way of writing.  It’s surprising that using these shortcuts like templates, widgets, and…sprys(?) were available to me all along and I went without them, making learning them now incredibly useful, but hard to learn.  You would think that learning a shortcut after knowing a program would make it easier to use, but in actuality I keep looking for the old way of doing things.  I definitely enjoy using Dreamweaver, and since this is the only HTML coding program I’ve ever used I would like to be very fluent in all of its components in my career. 
               I think this class will help me understand both the difficult and easy to use components of Dreamweaver, and if anything my coding should only get faster with more practice and knowledge of these shortcuts.  It is just surprisingly tricky to learn an “easier” route to a code after learning the long, manual version.