[snowwrestler]

I had to read the question twice. Dreamweaver was the go-to in 2010? I think it was already well on its decline by then.

At a new job in 2003 one of my first tasks was to generate new “heat map” code since the company was updating the background image file for 50-state map interfaces. Dreamweaver had the best interface for doing that work, so I got a copy and spent a couple days carefully tracing the 50 state outlines (which Dreamweaver turned into geometric shape code).

But even then, most of our sites were running on a database-backed CMS. By 2010 we were building sites in Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla.

I knew folks still maintaining sites with Dreamweaver templates at that time, but they were all legacy sites in academic and government jobs. Most of those types of orgs at the time still thought a website was something you built once and used for decades, like a building.

[rchaud]

That depends on how people remember "decline". Blackberry was thought to be dead in 2009, 2 years after the iPhone, but that year BB sold more devices than ever.

For a long time, "UI design" was done in Adobe Photoshop, so using Adobe Dreamweaver to build out the final product and upload to SFTP was a perfectly serviceable workflow. Back then, websites were needed for a Google presence. Today you can have a business through a Facebook page, or pay to advertise on Google Maps or Yelp. Anything more complicated and you'd need a full SaaS ecommerce platform, not something that only does static HTML pages like DW.

[lubujackson]

Funny story, I'm a SWE and my wife used to work as a marketing manager. Her boss wanted her to make something similar, a heat map over a U.S. map. Except he wanted it to work in Excel. She asked me about it and I told her I could code something like that, but no way inside Excel...

Sure enough, she hacked on it for a while and was able to actually build a functioning heat map in Excel. I have no idea how it works. I've been a dev for 20+ years and that remains one of the more voodoo tech things I've seen!

[snowwrestler]

In one of the most consequential hacks ever, the Chinese broke into RSA in order to then access Lockheed Martin and steal classified info.

They did it by embedding an Adobe Flash object in one cell of an Excel file, which self-executed when the Excel file was opened. Desktop Excel is insane.

[becquerel]

Excel is not merely Turing-complete, but a step above, able to achieve dark things best left unsaid.

[anakaine]

Set default zoom on the sheet to very small and map out states by cells - treat them like pixels.

So much yuck.

[leptons]

I did this back in the early/mid 1990's. I wrote a program that could convert .gif files to Excel using the cells as pixels. I converted a pic of a supermodel and sent the excel file to my buddies. They were surprised to say the least.

[cluckindan]

Excel has a store with many types of choropleth charts for free. Takes literally two minutes to make a US heatmap.

[pentagrama]

My first websites around 98 I landed on something more obscure to build them I think, Net Objects Fusion. Later switched to (Macromedia) Dreamweaver.

[justinkramp]

Built an e-commerce site in 1998 using net objects fusion. Had no idea what I was doing but it helped me learn quickly.

[dasil003]

Yeah I used it at my first job in 2000 which was essentially a webmaster job my local college. But 2001 we were already moving away from it as we started to embed PHP here and there, and eventually start building full-blown apps inline into the website (replacing poorly integrated ColdFusion stuff developed in isolation by some other department back in the 90s).