Dreamweaver CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 21. Creating Reusable Page Elements

OK, so you finished designing your company’s new website. It looks great and your boss is ecstatic. But you’ve really only just begun—before you can launch the site, you have to build hundreds of pages. And once the site’s online, you need to keep updating it so it stays fresh and inviting.

That’s where Dreamweaver’s snippets and library features come in, streamlining the sometimes tedious work of building and updating site pages.

As you create more and more web pages (and more and more websites), you may find yourself crafting the same page elements over and over again. Many pages may share elements that always stay the same: a copyright notice, a navigation bar, or a logo, for example. And you may find yourself frequently using complex components, such as a pull-down menu that lists all the countries where you ship products or a unique design for your site’s photos and captions.

Recreating the same components time after time is tiresome and—thanks to Dreamweaver—unnecessary. The program provides two subtly different tools that let you reuse common page elements: snippets and Library items.

Snippets Basics

Snippets aren’t fancy or complex, but they sure save time. A snippet is simply a chunk of code you store away and then plunk into your web pages as necessary. Snippets can be as simple as boilerplate legal text, or as complex as HTML instructions, CSS formatting rules, or JavaScript program code. For example, say you always use the same ...