Dreamweaver CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Working with Text

The basic building block for most websites is, was, and always will be text. Oh, sure, you can stream feature films and TV shows from Netflix, but it’s text, in the form of paragraphs, headings, and captions, that helps you find the film you want. Want to stream some music from Pandora or iTunes Radio? Same story. Text describes the songs, albums, and artists. You may love video, audio, and quality graphics, but you rely on the written word when you surf the Web.

As you build web pages and sites, you’ll spend a lot of time adding and formatting text. To get your message across effectively, you need to understand how Dreamweaver works with it. That’s what this chapter is all about—it covers the not-always-simple act of getting text into your Dreamweaver documents. First you’ll learn how to add text to pages in Design view—the standard “view” you’ll use to build new pages. You’ll learn how to apply HTML tags that mark chunks of text as paragraphs, headings, sidebars, and so on.

Near the end of the chapter, you’ll see how to add text to pages using Dreamweaver’s revamped Live view. In the past, you could only preview pages in Live view, you couldn’t edit them. But with the current version of Dreamweaver, you can now edit there, too.

In Chapter 3, you’ll learn how to format the text you add here so that it looks professionally designed.

Adding Text to Pages in Design View

In Design view, Dreamweaver works much like a word-processing program. When you create a ...