I am looking into moving away from Adobe Dreamweaver and turning to Adobe Muse or WordPress. The reason for this is because my coding skills are not great. Does anyone have experience with Adobe Muse? I am planning in using premium templates for my own website and future clients. Any advice is welcome.

Why don't you work on improving your coding skills?

 

To get the most out of WordPress you have to learn to code, using premade templates won't really cut it as a professional. There's plenty of places like TreeHouse and Codeschool where you can improve your coding abilities.

Hi rbrtsmith, I am starting to get more work with video now, and I am not sure what to do. Most clients I deal with don't care if its coded in Dreamweaver or WordPress. I may not have the time to really look at the code. Thanks for the advice.

Maybe outsource the web stuff to a developer then if your main focus is on video? That all said: as long as you are being transparent with clients that you are using pre-made themes then it's ok. But if you wanna work with larger organisations you will have to look into outsourcing / employing a developer - a theme won't cut it for them.

Yes Robert, I think you are right. I would be doing work for small business. I have no corporate work outside of video work. Thanks again for the advice.

Wordpress will probably offer everything you need. Using a quality, customizable theme you can create some great looking websites with eCommerce capability as well. I would recommend looking into the Genesis Framework and the Child themes for it. I also like to use a paid plugin (forget the name atm, just google it) that lets you customize every part of it. My blog is using that setup right now. Links in the signature if you're interested.

I came from a print design background so muse is perfect for me, it's basically like using indesign. I can do some html and am ok with css but I would not attempt wordpress without decent coding knowledge, it's not as simple as purchasing a theme themeforest and that's it. If however you feel that your skills lie in design then do as Robert suggests and outsource to a developer for complex sites, but if it's just a fairly simple brochure type site then give muse a go, it's already got a simple in-browser cms and will be responsive by the end of the year so for most sites it's perfect.

Initially I thought this question made no sense since you can't compare Dreamweaver with WordPress.

 

Then I guessed you are using the design view in Dreamweaver.

 

If you aren't too fused about improving your coding then WordPress is a viable idea. Won't be able to make anything ground breaking, but I know plenty of people who make a living off churning out sites.

If you want complete control over the design and your client doesn't need to add more pages to the site once the project is finished, then go with muse. ecommerce and SEO are very easy to accomplish in Muse as well (I believe that both of those sites were created in Muse). Also, if your client needs to be able to add, remove, or adjust products in the eCommerce store, that widget will work perfectly.

If the client needs to be able to add new pages (outside of products inside the store) then you'll need to go with wordpress

So whether or not a client needs to be able to add more pages tends to draw a very clear line between the two platforms.

At least 25% of clients manage to mess up most wordpress sites and they are best removed from one's portfolio, most of the time we will limit the changes they can make but some will ask you not to do that, wordpress sites or in fact any cms can end up being a complete headache sometimes, this is a chance for you to upsell your services, either offer a maintenance contract or go for ad-hoc pricing as and when the client requires say a new page. Also remember that most clients never use the cms past the first initial week or so.