Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

Why Dreamweaver?

You can find other web design programs on the market—dozens of them, in fact. But Dreamweaver is one of the leaders, thanks to key benefits like these:

• Visual page-building. If you’ve spent any time using a text editor to punch out HTML for your web pages, you know the tedium involved in adding even a simple photograph. When your boss asks you to add her photo to the company home page, you launch your trusty text editor and type in something like <img src=“images/staff/bigcheese.jpg” width=“100” height=“150” alt=“The Boss”>. Not only is this approach prone to typos, it also separates you from what you want the page to look like.

  Dreamweaver, on the other hand, gives you a several ways to stay in touch with your page’s visual design. If your interest is in design and not HTML, you can work in the program’s Design view. Drag an image to your budding web page there, and Dreamweaver displays the picture on the page. Just as a word processor displays documents as they’ll look when you print them out, so Dreamweaver gives you a close approximation of what your page will look like in a web browser.

  Another development approach web designers commonly use is keeping a page’s code and its browser-rendered look side-by-side. Dreamweaver’s Split view handles that, giving you direct access to the HTML of a page on one half of the screen and to its visual look in the other half.

  Finally, because Dreamweaver’s Design view is only an approximation of what a page looks like in a browser, ...