Building Web Sites All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Using Dreamweaver: Advanced Techniques

In This Chapter

• Using prebuilt page designs in Dreamweaver

• Creating your own templates in Dreamweaver

• Managing your assets and library items

• Implementing behaviors on your pages

Dreamweaver 8 has several, built‐in tools and features that make your job as a site builder easier. One especially useful feature is Dreamweaver's collection of prebuilt pages — pre‐existing designs into which you place your content — that can help you get up and running very fast. You can also build special pages called templates — which are essentially the same as prebuilt pages, but you create these according to your specific needs — to make site building and maintenance easier for you and/or your team. The great thing about prebuilt pages and templates is that you can use the same ones over and over, instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time you start a new site project.

If you have content that will appear in multiple places on your site — such as footers, headers, and navigation aids — Dreamweaver also provides features that make handling this situation and updating a site easier. You can build little modules of code to include in your pages.

In this chapter, we look at a Dreamweaver‐specific feature called library items (pieces of code that you can quickly add to a page and reuse countless times) and the Assets panel, where you can see all the elements of a site. We also cover behaviors, which are small bits of JavaScript code that you use to add ...