Dreamweaver in a Nutshell

Site Construction Tasks

Constructing a successful web site requires a series of steps to ensure both its visibility and its effectiveness (often in regard to sales).

• Define your graphics. Sketch them out so that you’re not the only one who can see what they look like. Be sure to get client approval of the basic design before producing all your graphics.

• Define your navigational system using navigation bars, frames, jump menus, or something fancier such as Flash.

• Design your directory structure and create a standard file naming system. See Chapter 6 for more site-planning tips.

• Define your site using Site → Define so you have easy access to all your site’s assets. (See Chapter 6 for more details.)

• Focus the development of your site on its primary goal (making money, building community, or disseminating information) and not on dynamic effects for their own sake.

• Design templates for your site’s pages (see Chapter 8).

• Convert repetitive images, HTML, and links into Library items that can be reused and updated across the site quickly (see Chapter 9).

• Define CSS stylesheets for your site (see Chapter 10).

• Use HTML styles to speed the application of text styles. (See Chapter 11).

Deployment Guidelines

You’ll ordinarily preview individual pages and your entire site in a browser using File → Preview in Browser (F12), not in Dreamweaver itself.

Tip

Preview your pages as you develop them so that problems are spotted early. Test early, test often, test on all target platforms in all target browsers ...