Chapter 1. Dreamweaver CS5.5 Guided Tour
Dreamweaver CS5.5 is a powerful program for designing and building websites. If you’re brand-new to Dreamweaver, turn to What Dreamweaver Is All About to get a quick look at what this program can do; if you’re a longtime Dreamweaver fan, this page shows you what’s new in this, its latest incarnation.
This chapter provides a basic overview of Dreamweaver—the different windows, toolbars, and menus you’ll use every time you build a web page. You’ll also learn to set up the program so you can begin building pages. And, because doing is often a better way to learn than just reading, you’ll get a step-by-step tour of web page design—the Dreamweaver way—in the tutorial at the end of this chapter.
The Dreamweaver CS5.5 Interface
Dreamweaver CS5.5’s interface shares the look and feel of other programs in the Adobe “Creative Suite,” like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash. Out-of-the-box, Dreamweaver organizes its various windows as a unified whole (see Figure 1-1). That is, the edges of all the windows touch each other, and resizing one window affects the others around it. This type of interface is common on Windows computers, but Mac fans accustomed to independent floating panels might find this look strange. Give it a chance. As you’ll soon see, the design has some benefits. (But, if you just can’t stand this locked-in-place style, you can detach the various panels and place them wherever you like on the screen; see Organizing Your Workspace for instructions.) ...