Dreamweaver has been around since 1996, with a long history of improvement over several incremental upgrades. Today, the program includes hundreds of features, wizards and other tools to help make the job of building web pages and web sites easier, faster and more accurate. Still, most people use only a tiny fraction of the power available to them.
Software publishers are deeply interested in this kind of thing. For years, the way to sell your program was to show that it did more, that it had more features than the competition. But users have consistently shown that they will gain a comfort level with a few dozen features and… stop learning. When new versions of the program are released, they expend just enough effort to learn how to do the old things in the new ways, and then stop. All of the rest of the power of the program is wasted.
Some of this is the press of time. You pass over menu options every day because you don't have the time now to learn what they do and how they work and think of ways these new features could help you. Often we know we can save time learning some new way of doing things, but it takes five minutes to learn something that will save us twenty seconds every time we use it. It is easy to pass on a bargain like that when you have to get a page done now.
Still other features are not really discoverable by the average user. Keyboard shortcuts often fall into this category. Sometimes you will find the key combination in a menu selection. Others do not appear in any menu and seem to be closely held secrets of some kind of weird propeller-headed Brotherhood Of The Dreamweavers. If more people knew about these, they might use them, but there is no way to easily find out they are available.
You can get Dreamweaver help all over, from books to newsgroups and Web sites, no matter what campus you are on. Student workers pick it up quickly and easily, if they don't already know Dreamweaver. And you can always bring your questions and concerns to the UNL Web Developers Network meetings, or post them to the bulletin board.
