That being said, I can say that I sometimes miss all of the built-in functionality and multi-site management of Dreamweaver but that’s about it. The site-preview mode is a nice idea but was always very laggy, always found I relied of FF/Firebug combo anyways and still do.

Got to agree with you on the rest for sure. Would add Campaign Monitor (email marketing but they let you white-label it) and Syncplicity (for the collaboration) too.

I would probably add Transmit (FTP), Media Temple and Typekit to the list (if it were mine).

I’ve been using Dreamweaver for a long time and haven’t seen a need to change yet. Let me clear something up about Photoshop… Adobe’s software does so much stuff that trying to spread yourself thin by learning more than a couple leads you to only be average in them. I’ve been working in Photoshop for 10 years so that’s what I continue to use. I haven’t found myself in a situation where Photoshop wasn’t able to do what I needed it to.

On a side note, my business partner who does all the graphic design uses Illustrator, because that’s what he’s been using for years.

The issue keeps popping up everywhere — Photoshop in web design. It’s an issue because it’s a photo editing software, not meant for “web design”, yet so many of those who call themselves web designers use it as their universal tool for everything they believe is design. It’s all about “slicing PSDs”.

Illustrator is a vector graphics app and would do a better job at designing graphics for websites. Fireworks can put it together to a prototype. Let’s leave Photoshop for our photos.

I just find it ironic that a site for such an awesome tool would look like that. You could probably manage to build a good website with Notepad++ however I didn’t see anything in there that would help with managing multiple website projects? Please correct me if I’m wrong, but one of the things that helps separate Dreamweaver is that you can easily manage hundred’s of sites with it.

There’s no reason why Notepad++ can’t be used to make the same sorts of sites that you can do in Dreamweaver. http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/ is not an indication of Notepad++’s ability, but rather the guy who made the site (he’s a C++ programmer, not a web designer).

First off, I appreciate the feedback and let me start by saying that this is my toolkit and it’s what works best for me. I stopped searching for web development apps once I began using Dreamweaver 8 and I personally think that Dreamweaver CS4 is worth the $399.

While I haven’t used all of the programs that you mentioned I have used some of them and they didn’t even come close to the capabilities and functionalities of Dreamweaver. If on a tighter budget then these might actually be worth looking into: Aptana, Coda, Textmate, Espresso, BBEdit

On the other hand don’t fool yourself into thinking these programs will get you by:
Notepad++ – Maybe if you wanna design a site like this: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net
Komodo – Actually it’s only free for 21 days then you have to pay $145
Textwrangler – not built for developing websites, only for editing an existing file.