Archive for the ‘Dreamweaver’ tag
Dreamweaver Training Can Change Your Career
We run training courses on Adobe Dreamweaver, the industry-standard web development software. And we are increasingly finding that the profile of the person wanting to learn Dreamweaver is becoming distinctly, well, frankly, unpredictable! It seems that just about anyone nowadays can find themselves needing to build a website or to create web content in some shape or form.
Just as the use of a graphical interface has changed computing, making it more user-friendly, the use of Adobe Dreamweaver renders people with limited understanding of web construction capable of putting together a quality site. It is also an excellent platform for learning how web sites should be put together. For example, when you create a new page, Dreamweaver lets you choose from a series of standard layouts based on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), the recommended specification for creating web pages. The code produced by Dreamweaver contains useful comments explaining how the page layout works.
Many smaller companies have already learned to rely on Adobe Dreamweaver to build and manage their own websites, creating and altering pages and then uploading them using Dreamweaver’s built-in FTP utility to make them live and available to their audience. Those organisations with a more pressing need to establish a web presence can still turn to a professional web development companies to get them started and then, using Adobe Dreamweaver , make changes and updates to their own pages for themselves, often saving a small fortune.
Another way that companies can save a few bucks is by commissioning web designers to create Dreamweaver templates and then using these templates in-house to build the website themselves. This also has the benefit of allowing organizations to maintain control of their site from the outset.
Although Dreamweaver is simple to use, it is unlikely that the average user can simple load it onto their machine and start using it effectively. Most people will benefit from having some Dreamweaver training. This will show them which are the essential aspects of the program and the process of creating a basic site and making it live. A good Dreamweaver training course will also give users an overview of the may web technologies, the underlying code, which Dreamweaver uses as the users visually create their web pages.
One of the best ways to make a site useful for visitors is making it interactive, allowing users to search for the specific content that they want. By attending an advanced Dreamweaver training course, staff within an organization can learn to add database-driven content to their website using technologies such as ASP, PHP or ColdFusion. And, here again, Dreamweaver does the lion’s share of the work, allowing users to create sophisticated search and results pages using the same simply point-and-click and drag-and-drop techniques used to create basic content.
The The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Solutions, a UK IT training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver training courses in London and throughout the UK.
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Dreamweaver is Unsurpassed.
About Dreamweaver: Dreamweaver is an application of web development that was created originally by Macromedia and which now is being developed by the Adobe Systems. Dreamweaver integrates web development’s various aspects, including site management, web server tools and page creation with which a user can get a good perspective of the whole website. You can get Dreamweaver for both Windows Operation Systems and Mac. Recent versions of this application have also incorporated support for various web technologies like JavaScript, CSS and a number of frameworks and server-side scripting languages like PHP, ASP and ColdFusion.
Features of Dreamweaver: The WYSIWYG mode of Dreamweavers can hide from the users, the pages’ HTML codes, even though the application is a WYSIWYG hybrid and a web development and design application. This also helps the non coders to create web pages and sites. One can easily create the table based layout using the Dreamweaver application. The application’s recent version also supports the standard based layout, enabling the conversion of tables to layers.
The locally installed websites in the web browsers can be previewed by the users using Dreamweaver. Site management tools like FTP, SFTP and WebDAV features of synchronization and file transfers, templating features which help in the source update of shared code and layout of the whole sites without the server side includes and scripting, are present in this application. It also has the ability to use regular expressions and search items to find and replace code or text lines across the full site.
The third party ‘extensions’ can be used by Dreamweaver for enabling and extending the application’s main functionality. Many extension developers, who make available the free and commercial extensions, support Dreamweaver for many web development tasks ranging from fully featured shopping carts to simple effects of rollover. Also the files can be edited locally by Dreamweaver, and using WebDAV, SFTP and FTP, upload them into the remote web server similar to the other HTML editions.
Drawbacks: A drawback of Dreamweaver is its having the potential of producing HTML pages whose HTML code amount and file size are larger than what would be a page that is optimally hand coded, causing the poor performance of web browsers. Dreamweaver has also been criticized in the past by some website developers for producing code which many times do not comply with the standards of W3C. The Dreamweaver 8.0 has had a poor performance on the Acid 2 Test which was developed by Web Standards Project.
Syntax Highlighting: Syntax Highlighting is supported by the latest versions of Dreamweaver for the languages like ActionScript, ASP.Net, Active Server Pages, C#, ColdFusion, Cascading Style Sheets, EDML, Extensible Markup Language, HyperText Markup Language, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations, Java, JavaServer Pages, JavaScript, PHP, Visual Basic, VB Script and Wireless Markup Language. For many of the above mentioned languages, code completion is available and you can also add to its repertoire, your own language syntax highlighting.
Language Availability: Various languages in which the Adobe Dreamweaver is available are English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Swedish, Polish, Turkish, Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional and Brazilian.
When it comes to Adobe Dreamweaver Tutorials, getting the right information can be a daunting task. That’s why we put together this confidential report for you at Dreamweaver Video Tutorials.
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Working With HTML and XHTML In Dreamweaver
HTML is a markup language used to create web pages designed to be accessed across the World Wide Web using browser software such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. The version of HTML in current use is referred to as XHTML, a stricter, rationalised version of the original HTML specification. One important fact to note about HTML and XHTML pages is that they describe the content and structure of the page rather than the position and presentation of the elements on the page.
The first difference between an HTML and XHTML page is the document type definition. There are several ways in which this specification can be made in Dreamweaver. One of the simplest is to go to the Modify menu and choose Page Properties. Here, in the Title/Encoding category, one of the options reads Document Type (DTD).
There are a good few options available in the drop-down menu next to this setting, some relating to HTML version 4 and some to XHTML version 1. These DTD settings control the rules for the mark-up language so that the browsers can render the content correctly. For any new content you are creating, the best specification to choose is XHTML 1.0 transitional since it uses the current XHTML specification while allowing backward compatibility with slightly older browsers.
When looking at an HTML page, the structural content is perhaps not immediately apparent. However Dreamweaver provides a number of useful ways of keeping tabs on the structure of your web page content. One of these is known as the Tag Selector. Wherever the cursor is positioned, the HTML code relating to that part of the page is displayed in the bottom left of the page on the Status Bar in an area called the Tag Selector.
When the browser reads the page, the tags surrounding text and other elements tell the browser the structural importance of each element. The H1 tag tells the browser that a piece of text is a major heading. The H2 tag signifies a sub-heading, and so on. As these tags are displayed in the Tag Selector, you can get an idea of the structure of the page and you can also click on the tags to select the element they contain.
Although the tags tell the browser the structural importance of each element, the HTML page doesn’t contain any information that helps the browser decide how each element should be displayed. This is the role of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). An XHTML page is pretty similar to an HTML page. However, its syntax is stricter. Let’s take a look at some examples…
One example of this difference is that XHTML is case sensitive while HTML is not. In XHTML, all tags are lowercase so the H1 tag has to be written h1. In HTML, h1 or H1 can be used.
In XHTML, the closing tag of an element cannot be ommitted: in HTML it is permissible to have an opening tag without a closing tag. One such example is the horizontal rule element (hr) which creates a dividing line between two sections on a webpage. This element is represented by a single tag, since it can never be used as a container for other stuff. In XHTML, there is a special syntax for such non-container elements: a single tag which is both an opening and closing tag (hr/). In HTML, the single opening tag is used without the need for a closing tag (hr).
In summary, XHTML is the current version of HTML and this is the standard that should be used for any new projects. However, existing projects that one may inherit may well contain HTML rather the XHTML. Therefore, one should be aware of both. Remember also that HTML and XHTML describe only structural aspects of web page content: neither of them should contain information regarding the presentation and display of content. The display and presentation of web content should be specified using CSS.
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Top Three New Features in Adobe Dreamweaver CS4
1. Smart Objects
The Photoshop integration which was begun in Dreamweaver CS3 has been enhanced in CS4 to offer via the use of Adobe’s Smart Objects technology. A Photoshop file can be imported directly into Dreamweaver and will automatically come in as a smart object.
Photoshop images are can be inserted using the same techniques as inserting any other image file: Insert – Image; dragging from the Files panel; dragging from the Assets panel; or using the Insert toolbar. A Photoshop-style Optimise window automatically appears and you can choose the settings appropriate for that particular image usually GIF, JPEG or PNG.
Once the image has been imported, an icon is displayed in the upper left of the image indicating that it is a smart object. Also, in the Property Inspector, the location of the original PSD file is shown in a box marked “Original”.
The Photoshop integration which was begun in Dreamweaver CS3 has been enhanced in CS4 to offer via the use of Adobe’s Smart Objects technology. A Photoshop file can be imported directly into Dreamweaver and will automatically come in as a smart object.
Photoshop images are can be inserted using the same techniques as inserting any other image file: Insert – Image; dragging from the Files panel; dragging from the Assets panel; or using the Insert toolbar. A Photoshop-style Optimise window automatically appears and you can choose the settings appropriate for that particular image usually GIF, JPEG or PNG.
The Property Inspector can be used to change the attributes of any element you select on an HTML page. In previous versions of Dreamweaver, changing the attributes of highlighted text would cause the program to create CSS classes with names like “Style1″, “Style2″, etc. in the head area of the current page. This random creation of styles was often responsible for getting new web developers into bad habits.
The fact that the image is a smart object means that if we resize it in Dreamweaver, it will automatically be re-optimised and a new version of the image will be generated with the new dimensions. (In previous versions, resizing an image would mean that the browser was responsible for resizing leading to poor image quality.
3. Improvements to CSS styles
The Property Inspector can be used to change the attributes of any element you select on an HTML page. In previous versions of Dreamweaver, changing the attributes of highlighted text would cause the program to create CSS classes with names like “Style1″, “Style2″, etc. in the head area of the current page. This random creation of styles was often responsible for getting new web developers into bad habits.
In Dreamweaver CS4, the Property Inspector contains buttons which allow you to switch between HTML and CSS options. When working in the CSS options, you can now target a specific CSS rule before choosing an attribute or, if necessary, create a new rule.
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