I have been researching different ways of creating websites and have recently come across a website that creates WordPress web sites.
I am wondering what is the difference between a WordPress site and a Site Built with Dreamweaver?
Why would someone choose WordPress over a Dreamweaver built site?
Wordpress is a content management system that is geared towards blogging by default. It stores/retrieves the content from a database and uses a theme system that generates each page dynamically.
At the very basic a DW site would just be a static site with separate HTML files containing the content for each page. Though DW can be used to build much more.
I would add to what Bpartch said about Dreamweaver, there’s no such thing really as a ‘dreamweaver site’, Dreamweaver is just a fancy text editor with built in ftp functionality. You can use it to make any kind of site you want including Wordpress type sites. Wordpress just does it for you.
wordpress is the way to go. to start a site with html is way too time consuming and difficult.
If you ain’t too savvy on PHP and don’t want to worry about custom functions and classes wordpress is the way to go. But if you want to get your hands dirty then you can always test yopur sanity by coding your own site in dreamweaver.
this however doesn’t mean you’re off the hook, there are times when you need to do custom functions in wordpress too
Dreamweaver and WordPress are both useful and each has its place. Each one has more power and usefulness than most of us need. They both are great tools for any designer’s toolbox. A quick search on the Internet will quickly reveal the differences.
They’re totally different things, One is a database driven CMS, the other is software for building any kind of website.
It’s like comparing a car to a factory that builds cars and saying that they’re the same thing, they’re not.
I would use Dreamweaver. it gives you more customization over your website.
Then I guess using Dreamweaver to edit your Wordpress files would be total customization. 
I’ve spent a fair bit of time with Dreamweaver (slowly edging towards doing everything in code view) in my first 8 months or so, but am now looking to combine Wordpress with it. Seems like the best of both worlds to have use of both programs working together so i agree with the above.
Do others agree this is a good setup? I’m yet to really sit down with Wordpress but using the two together looks a good way to go.
Yes, it works well. But, as has been said, you can do the same with any text editor, really.
In an ideal world, no one would want to choose a website based on the tools it was created with. Like has been said, WordPress is a content management system that you need to host remotely or on wordpress.com.
The comparison you’ve made probably results out of the assumption that a WordPress site MUST be modern and well coded because the tool is relatively new. Just like everyone automatically assumes that a website made with Frontpage must be bad (well, that might actually be true). 
Neither Dreamweaver nor WordPress are synonyms for “quality”. Dreamweaver is a text editor. You can use Notepad and built a better site. Dreamweaver is, if you will, a luxury version of an editor with many functions you can use to your advantage and even more functions you won’t ever need at all.
WordPress is a popular tool with which you can manage and maintain your site. It does not in any shape or form force you to use certain code. Here, like with the text editor of your choice, the quality of the web site and code depends on you, not on the tool.
To answer your question, I don’t think it is sensible to judge any website by the tools with which it has been created but rather looking under the hood and examining how a website was created, e.g. based on the quality of the markup, how well everything’s been optimised and…the list goes on and on.
Well my statement was meant sarcastically. As I do not think any particular editor makes a WP site any better then another editor. As kohoutek mentioned it’s what the author does with the markup that determines the quality.
If you’re familiar with DW than it may be a good editor to edit the WP files with. Me personally I do not want or need all that bloat just to edit HTML/CSS and what not.
If you do not know html and php, I would suggest going with wordpress.org or wordpress.com .
How you worded the question makes it obvious that you probably are not too familiar with html and php. Creating a static html website (which is what you call a dreamweaver site) will take more time to maintain as you have to do everything manually.
Going with a system like wordpress.com or blogger.com will allow you to create a website very quickly without much work (other than creating content).
Well I uses wordpress when I need a blog and wordpress will take care for everything only you need to add posts.
In Dreamweaver we can create a page from scratch and use our designing skills.
So in short wordpress is for blog and Dreamweaver is for website.
Ha. Yeah your right of course. I was just thinking in terms of workflow, but as you say, the editor makes very little if any difference.
stick with wordpress… in the long run you will not regret it. Plus, wordpress does an awesome job categorizing information into a solid database. Find a nice template that uses a CMS format so it looks more like a “web site” vs. a “blog”. Their are tons of designes to choose from out their even if you have to pay a little for a nice one.
Dreamweaver will keep you busy editing and fixing stuff even with includes in your site. Trust me on this!
I appreciate all of the feedback. I would like to expand on my question by asking in a different way. If I use WordPress for my site, what functionally does it not perform or what features does it not offer that would make using Dreamweaver and DHTML, etc. a better option? Can you give some examples of why someone would not want to use WordPress for a website?
I think you are still confusing the roles of Dreamweaver and WordPress. I use WordPress with Dreamweaver; they do different things. Dreamweaver helps you to write and edit the code that you put into WordPress or any other CMS—or a static site, for that matter.
To make a website go zing, you can use languages like JavaScript and PHP. You can use these with or without WordPress. But WordPress is built with PHP, and so have a lot of PHP functionality built in, making it a lot more convenient than having to write and construct all of your own PHP functionality. You can post content into WordPress which will go into a database and be accessible in a range of ways without you having to do anything, which makes it (like any other CMS) very convenient. Trying to code all this by hand statically is slow and inefficient.
Whether you are using WordPress or just building a static site in Dreamweaver, you would add JavaScript functionality in the same way.
WordPress is mainly suited for blogging; meaning that you have one main page on which regular posts appear, and a few other pages like About Me etc, but which don’t do much. So if you want a site with lots of pages and subfolders, WordPress is not the best option. Either build a static site with Dreamweaver, or use one of many other CMSs that are designed for managing website content, like ExpressionEngine. It is very inefficient to build a static site in Dreamweaver if it needs to be updated often and in complex ways. This is what CMSs are designed for.
Dreamweaver can be used to design all three types of sites (dreamweaver, Drupal and Wordpress) - for example you can build a Drupal site in Dreamweaver or a WordPress site in Dreamweaver. WordPress is first of all a blogging tool. Many people are starting to use it to deal with their entire site, but most of the time you can tell these sites because they appear like blogs. They might have 1 or 2 static pages, but generally the blog is the most important part of a WordPress site.