Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Adding Text to Your Web Pages

Nowadays, streaming video, audio, and high-quality graphics are what draw most people to Web sites. After all, it’s exciting to hear the latest song from your favorite band, see a preview of a yet-to-be released blockbuster, and tune in to YouTube to see the kid down the street embarrass himself in front of a billion Web viewers.

But the fact is, the Web is primarily woven with words. iPhone 3G reviews, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie gossip, and countless personal blogs about cats still drive people to the Web. As you build Web pages and Web sites, you’ll spend a lot of your time adding and formatting text. To get your message across effectively, you need to understand how Dreamweaver works with text.

This chapter covers the not-always-simple act of getting text into your Dreamweaver documents. In Chapter 3, you can read about formatting this text so that it looks professionally designed.

Adding Text in Dreamweaver

In many ways, Dreamweaver works like a word processing program. When you create a new document, the blinking cursor appears at the top of the page, ready for you to begin typing. When you finish a paragraph, you press Enter or Return to start a new one. Text, as well as anything else you add to a Web page, starts at the top of the page and works its way to the bottom.

Adding Special Characters

Many useful special characters—such as copyright or trademark symbols—don’t appear on your keyboard, making them difficult or impossible to type. ...