Omeka versus Dreamweaver

My institution is trying to decide on whether to invest on omeka or dreamweaver. I am attracted to omeka because it seems to be user-friendly, less code and it would attract more faculty. There seems to be a large array of templates. Dreamweaver does attract both the faculty who want to code and some templates for those who do not although we have less of the former. There is also the issue of cost.

It will depend a lot on the specific needs of your institution, and what specific kinds of sites your faculty will be building.

Omeka is aimed at libraries, archives, and museums to make it easy to create online exhibits of their holdings, though others have used it for other purposes. Like WordPress, it is designed so that users do not need to know any HTML or PHP.

Dreamweaver, from what I understand, is aimed more for developers to build entire sites from scratch, so generally I'd say Omeka and DreamWeaver are in very different categories.

Thank you for the quick response! I know more institutions are using omeka in their courses. Can it be used for more than what you have listed? I will be working on a course that will build a digital archive, a repository of databases and bibliography, and an exhibit so this is great but I do want it to be used for several different purposes at the college. I was told that unlike Wordpress, it is more user friendly.

For building a digital archive in a course, I would definitely say Omeka is stronger over DreamWeaver. With DreamWeaver, you'd be building a lot before you could get to building the actual archive and repo and exhibit.

For other uses, browsing through the list of sites using Omeka might help. I find that colleges and universities have a wide range of possible purposes for a web-publishing system, so the real work is often nailing down the purposes, then deciding what platform is best for each.

Thanks for the help! One question a faculty member asked was whether we can do annotations using omeka. She wants to use annotations and texts, I would like to use them with texts and art objects.

There's Image Annotation for images, and Commenting for discussion. Intralinear annotations on text more complicated, but the Neatline suite or other plugins might come close.

Thank you!