Customer Rating: 
Summary: Worthy Investment for Start-Up
Comment: Though a bit pricey (I won't deny) this package is almost complete for anyone starting their own business and wanting to retain control over their website.
I used DreamWeaver and Flash to design my website (though I have to admit, with some of the formatting DreamWeaver gets a bit fiddlesome, so I reverted back to faithful html coding). And with Flash, was able to make it even spankier than I thought possible.
You don't need to be a computing genius - I knew NOTHING about Flash before using it - and it's pretty self-explanatory (and the User Maual is pretty comprehensive).
With Fireworks and Contribute I can retain all the control I want (with a very ameniable Hosting Company).
Though the price put me off, I don't regret the purchase. It is the complete set for me designing, maintaining and managing my websites. I'm happy! I don't need to buy anything else!!! AND, of course, the most important thing - the basics are really simple to learn....once you want to get smarter, then I suggest some reading material.
Pretty good all-in-one package, in my opinion.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Misses the mark for a major release
Comment: I've used Macromedia Studio for years now, and sadly this is the first release that hasn't amazed me. For the price of buying the full version, the improvements to each title are minimal. Flash offers the most (useful) improvements, especially its new filter tools for adding shadows etc to movieClips.Also the FlashPaper tool is very useful for printing documents into PDF format, although the file size of PDF's is unusually large. With nice little automated buttons being added to Office, the level of integration has been well-implemented.
Dreamweaver on the other hand doesn't offer much more than what I would expect from a free update. It's code collapsing tool (an awesome idea) is fiddly when code is continuously expanded and edited.
I learned to programme ASP and ASP.NET (to a degree) by using DW MX and its code-hinting functionality. Version 8 sadly completely ignores the release of ASP.NET 2.0 from Microsoft. Microsoft's huge new release makes many things simpler than they used to be, and will definitely win loads of people over from other server-side languages. But where are Macromedia to welcome this market? I realse DW8 was released slightly after ASP.NET 2, but no effort has been made on Macromedia's behalf to catch up and implement this functionality into the product. This is a massive shame and with tools like Microsoft's Visual Web Developer available for FREE that make ASP editing LOADS easier, Macromedia are going to have to act fast. DW has always been the best web editor, but now with so much missing from the current market's expectations, it just doesn't hold it's own.
