Building Pages Based on a Template

Building a template is only a prelude to the actual work of building your site. Once you finish your template, it’s time to produce pages.

To create a new document based on a template, choose File→New to open the New from Template window (see Figure 18-14). Click the Templates tab and select the current site you’re working on from the Templates For list. All templates for the selected site appear in the right column. Select the template you wish to use and click Create.

WORKAROUND WORKSHOPPreventing Rollover Accidents

For a navigation bar to work effectively, the images used for a rollover must be preloaded; otherwise, there’s a noticeable delay between the time a visitor moves the mouse over a button, and the highlighted button graphic downloads from the Internet and finally appears.

Unfortunately, Dreamweaver MX has a bug. If you add rollover images to a nested template, Dreamweaver fails to add the proper preloading code to pages created from the template. There is a workaround, but it’s a bit complex:

  1. Open the master template, and make the <body> tag’s onLoad property editable. (Follow the steps on page 543 for creating an editable tag attribute.)

  2. Open the nested template—the one based on the master template from step 1—and add all rollover images (the navigation bar, for instance) for this template.

  3. Switch into Code view (View→Code) and locate the <body> tag. Look for the onLoad property and copy everything from onload=” to the closing quotation ...

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