Building a Web Site For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Creating the Basic Page in Dreamweaver

After you understand what’s going on under the hood of a Web page, as discussed in the previous chapters, it’s time to sit back and let Adobe Dreamweaver (formerly Macromedia Dreamweaver, but that’s how things go in the world of computers) do a little magic for you.

Don’t worry about doing anything fancy here; I cover site design in other chapters. For now, just play around with Dreamweaver and experience the joy of working with a truly excellent program (one of my personal favorites, seriously). In the next few sections, I walk you through using it to set page properties and work with text and links. Of course, you should feel free to experiment with different values, colors, and so on, as you familiarize yourself with the program.

Setting the page properties

In Chapter 3, I explain how to set the page title and page background with the normal HTML approach. Here’s how to set page properties in Dreamweaver:

1.	In the Properties panel at the bottom of the Dreamweaver workspace (refer to Figure 4-1), click the Page Properties button. The Page Properties dialog box appears.
2.	If you want to change the text color, click in the Text Color box to open a drop-down palette, as shown in Figure 4-2. Choose a color from the palette that appears by clicking it. Figure 4-2. Set the colors for your page in the Page Properties dialog box. [View full size image] If you want to change the background color, click in the Background Color box and then choose ...