Dreamweaver Fundamentals

Adobe Dreamweaver gives you the tools to create professional-looking web pages, rich with dynamic content and visual imagery. In today's competitive job market, web design skills are in high demand and Dreamweaver is the ideal program to help you learn them. Whether you are an experienced coder who wants to expand your design skills, or someone who has never coded before and is looking for a visually-accessible way to design pages for the web, this training class is for you.

Our Dreamweaver training in Sacramento simplifies this sometimes daunting software program via hands-on development of simple web page elements, so that by the end of the training you can:

• Create simple web pages
• Add and format text and images
• Understand how HTML and CSS interact to build and style a page
• Design a web page using tables and nested tables
• Use links to navigate through a site
• Upload a site to a server

Adobe Dreamweaver is a powerful What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) web page editor that allows anyone to build static or dynamic websites without coding - although it also allows experienced developers to directly code part or all of a page if they prefer. While you use Dreamweaver's intuitive point-and-click or drag-and-drop tools to design pages, Dreamweaver creates standards-based HTML and CSS automatically. 

With Dreamweaver, you can use graphical user interface to create advanced websites, interact with a database, develop secure login functionality, or implement scripting technologies like ColdFusion and JavaScript.

Our Introductory Dreamweaver training course starts you off with practical hands-on instruction that enables you to master the basics of website design and development.

Understanding Dreamweaver Basics

The websites that you see in your browser are the result of a collaborative effort that involves HTML, CSS, JavaScript, image and other files. In this section of our Dreamweaver training class, we show you the difference between these different types of files and how they interact with each other. Then, we'll focus on the initial steps of creating a website, so that you will be able to:

• Define and edit a website in Dreamweaver
• Understand how Dreamweaver manages the relationship between files
• Create a sitemap of files in a website
• Update file links and edit file locations

Creating a Basic Page

Even the most complex web page begins with three simple elements: text, graphics and links. Learning how to add and position these elements on a page also allows you to glimpse the code that Dreamweaver crafts in the background, and to understand more about the relationship between HTML and CSS. This section will teach you how to:

• Add paragraphs of text with line breaks
• Choose appropriate graphic formats, and place them on your page
• Align text and graphics
• Create links from images and text
• Insert META tags to assist in the classification of your webpage

Adding Hyperlinks and Image Tools

In the previous exercise we introduced you to some basics, but Dreamweaver offers a multitude of ways to work with auxiliary files such as image and hyperlinked files. Since linking and the relationships between files are largely what characterize the web, Dreamweaver provides a rich toolset for creating inter-file relationships. After this exercise, you will be able to:

• Use the Dreamweaver pointer tool to create links between files
• Work with placeholder images
• Create email and anchor links
• Link to different file types

Developing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

An attention-getting site is composed of its design aspects: fonts, colors, spacing and layout. On the web, these aesthetics are not handled with HTML, but rather with a different language specifically suited for design and styling called CSS. 

Typically separate from the HTML file, these style sheets are made up of all of the design choices that apply to one or more of your web pages - an arrangement that allows global design changes to be made quickly and efficiently. After completing this section, you should be able to:

• Understand basic CSS syntax
• Control the basic properties of a page using CSS
• Export styles into an external style sheet
• Create and attach style sheets to your web pages
• Use CSS Styles Panel in Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver: Working with Tables

When web sites were first being developed, designers used tables - essentially just rows and columns - to structure the page. Although much less functional and adaptable than CSS, tables are still used for sections of a page (or occasionally a whole page), so understanding tables and their various components is important. After completing this section you should be able to:

• Create a table and place content within its cells
• Use Dreamweaver and HTML to specify display properties such as borders and backgrounds
• Use CSS to modify the display properties of a table
• Align the table's content

Publishing Your Website with Dreamweaver

Once you finish building your web site locally, you need to test the web site to ensure it behaves the way you intended it. We show you how to quickly test for broken links, to ensure all images display correctly, and to spell check every page. We will also show you how to upload your site and maintain it. After completing this section, you should be able to:

• Test your web pages for accessibility and broken links
• Define and connect to a remote server
• Upload your pages to a remote site
• Synchronize your sites to upload changed pages

Prerequisites:

• A solid understanding of Windows’ file management, the concepts of right-clicking and selecting object properties