Dreamweaver or Creative Suite

Im a newbie looking to get into web page design to create my own websites. I
have no programming experience. Im looking at purchasing Dreamweaver, and was
wondering what its benefits were. In addition, I was wondering what the
additional benefits of Creative Suite Standard or Premium would give me.
Thanks in advance.

Well if you are not a student getting an educational discount I would recommend
starting with just DW for the cost.

The difference with the suites is what you need in your workflow. The
standard comes with Flash, Fireworks and Contribute. While DW makes the HTML
code, something like Fireworks is where you would design the graphics for the
site. Contribute is nothing special and Flash should be self-explanatory.

In the Premium suite you get more programs including Photoshop, Illustrator
and Acrobat. Acrobat I find to be an extremely useful tool because it allows
you to create PDFs in any application (if you are using Windows since Mac can
do this out-of-the-box). It also allows you to do more with PDFs such as
security if you want to distribute the files. Photoshop is a lot like
Fireworks in that it can make web graphics, however it was designed to
manipulate photos first so there are things you can do in Fireworks that you
can't in Photoshop and vice versa. Then Illustrator is more of a free-style
drawing tool.

So as you can see all of the programs do something different. But for a
beginner you don't need everything and Adobe does have multiple upgrade
versions so if you bought the standard you could always upgrade to the premium
later.

thanks for the reply. yes, i'd be getting a student discount. i can get the
following:

creative suite web/design standard for around $285
creative suite we/design premium for around $340
Dreamweaver by itself for $150

suggestions? i was thinking of just goin for premium, but wasnt sure to go
with Web or design. The reason i need to buy soon before i know much about
these programs is im graduating and want to take advantage of the discount
while i can.

Personally I think you'd be more likely to enjoy the educational process (and thus learn better) if you had all of the tools at your disposal.

Prehpreh, I started out with just dreamweaver, with in 2 months I was wishing I
had purchased webdesig premium because I wanted to work in PS to make my own
Logos and flash. So I ended buying the premium in the end. So if you think you
will ever use any of the other products I say go for the premium or you will
end up spending more in the long run. I don't regret buying the premium suite
and gave my dreamweaver to someone who I knew would put it to good use.