DreamWeaver: Beyond Basic Web Pages
Some months ago, NetObjects, publisher of my favorite Web page authoring tool, Fusion, went out of business, a victim of Microsoft's bundling of its FrontPage, a rival page-creation product, with Microsoft Office. Of course, I could have gone on working with Fusion indefinitely -- you can still buy it -- but it looked like no one would ever get it working properly with the latest versions of Office. And while FrontPage is a perfectly acceptable tool, I've never liked working with it.
So I decided to screw up my courage and learn one of the most popular tools used by professional Web-site designers: Dreamweaver 4, from Macromedia (www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/). I'm glad I did.
Dreamweaver is not for the faint of heart. A copy for Windows or Mac costs $299, or $399 bundled with its Fireworks image-editing companion (a combo I highly recommend). In addition to the cost in dollars, you can expect to spend some time learning to use the program effectively. But the payoff is a tool that lets you design any page you want without being regimented by the cookie-cutter templates of FrontPage (or, for that mater, Fusion).
ZONING ORDINANCES. Dreamweaver starts you out with a completely blank page, which can be a bit intimidating. But it includes a number of useful design tools. One of the best is the layout view, which allows you to divide the page into a number of zones for the placement of text or images. For example, one layout might use a banner area across the top, a strip down the left side for navigation buttons, and a general area for content.
One way of working in Dreamweaver is to create a basic page template for all the pages in your site. You can make zones of the template either editable or not. When you create a new page based on a template, you can do anything you want in the editable regions, but anything designated noneditable is locked, which prevents you form accidentally making a mess of your design.
Unlike FrontPage, Dreamweaver has no provision for automatically creating navigation buttons for your pages. It does offer a powerful and flexible tool called a navigation bar that you can use to create the navigation structure yourself, but it's up to you to create the buttons.
AMATEUR-FRIENDLY. That's where Fireworks comes in. Fireworks is an image-editing program that was specifically designed to work with Dreamweaver. Among its features is a button editor that automates the chore of creating the different states of a button -- normal, selected, pressed -- each of which is actually a separate graphic. And when you click on a Fireworks graphic in Dreamweaver, the program gives you the option of opening it for editing directly in Fireworks.
To make it easier to get started in Dreamweaver, Macromedia provides a free supplemental CD called the Solutions Kit, which includes tutorials, templates, and an assortment of buttons and other Web-page widgets that can be used as-is or modified to your liking. Macromedia also offers a number of add-ons, called extensions, through the Dreamweaver Exchange on its Web site. While many are designed by and for professional Web-site creators, some tools, such as the Web photo album, are ideal for amateurs.
On the other hand, for real hard-core programmers, Dreamweaver includes a copy of HomeSite, a code editor that lets you modify or even create pages by working directly with HTML, or hypertext markup language.
Most folks who want to put together a few Web pages -- and even many businesses -- will find FrontPage all the Web-authoring tool they need. But if you want to get more creative and don't mind some investment, Dreamweaver or the Dreamweaver/Fireworks combo could be just the thing you need
So I decided to screw up my courage and learn one of the most popular tools used by professional Web-site designers: Dreamweaver 4, from Macromedia (www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/). I'm glad I did.
Dreamweaver is not for the faint of heart. A copy for Windows or Mac costs $299, or $399 bundled with its Fireworks image-editing companion (a combo I highly recommend). In addition to the cost in dollars, you can expect to spend some time learning to use the program effectively. But the payoff is a tool that lets you design any page you want without being regimented by the cookie-cutter templates of FrontPage (or, for that mater, Fusion).
ZONING ORDINANCES. Dreamweaver starts you out with a completely blank page, which can be a bit intimidating. But it includes a number of useful design tools. One of the best is the layout view, which allows you to divide the page into a number of zones for the placement of text or images. For example, one layout might use a banner area across the top, a strip down the left side for navigation buttons, and a general area for content.
One way of working in Dreamweaver is to create a basic page template for all the pages in your site. You can make zones of the template either editable or not. When you create a new page based on a template, you can do anything you want in the editable regions, but anything designated noneditable is locked, which prevents you form accidentally making a mess of your design.
Unlike FrontPage, Dreamweaver has no provision for automatically creating navigation buttons for your pages. It does offer a powerful and flexible tool called a navigation bar that you can use to create the navigation structure yourself, but it's up to you to create the buttons.
AMATEUR-FRIENDLY. That's where Fireworks comes in. Fireworks is an image-editing program that was specifically designed to work with Dreamweaver. Among its features is a button editor that automates the chore of creating the different states of a button -- normal, selected, pressed -- each of which is actually a separate graphic. And when you click on a Fireworks graphic in Dreamweaver, the program gives you the option of opening it for editing directly in Fireworks.
To make it easier to get started in Dreamweaver, Macromedia provides a free supplemental CD called the Solutions Kit, which includes tutorials, templates, and an assortment of buttons and other Web-page widgets that can be used as-is or modified to your liking. Macromedia also offers a number of add-ons, called extensions, through the Dreamweaver Exchange on its Web site. While many are designed by and for professional Web-site creators, some tools, such as the Web photo album, are ideal for amateurs.
On the other hand, for real hard-core programmers, Dreamweaver includes a copy of HomeSite, a code editor that lets you modify or even create pages by working directly with HTML, or hypertext markup language.
Most folks who want to put together a few Web pages -- and even many businesses -- will find FrontPage all the Web-authoring tool they need. But if you want to get more creative and don't mind some investment, Dreamweaver or the Dreamweaver/Fireworks combo could be just the thing you need
