Dreamweaver is a tool that was originally
created by Macromedia, Inc. (now Adobe)
back in 1997. I have been using it since version 2 and it has been my
tool of choice for developing websites. Much of this is because I am
comfortable with it, I learned on it, and I know how to work around its idiosyncrasies. It
is definitely not for a starting web page builder, it assumes some level of
experience in building web sites with multiple pages, formatting, and link
navigation. You need to love this stuff :) I have Dreamweaver 8,
and am going to upgrade to Adobe's new version CS3 fairly soon..
If you know where to look, there are very many tools for building web pages. There
is the usual bold, italic, and color controls, and most of the features of
a word processor that will help you create a simple, clean web page with excellent
code. Dreamweaver lets you select how you want to design
your site, and adapts itself and writes very correct and clean source code. Do
you want simple HTML, do you want all the style tags in the page, or on a separate
style sheet? Do you want XML? For which kind of browsers do you
want to design a page? Old-skool bare bones browsers, the most current
web browser, cell phones?
Try this: remove styles -- reset
style sheet
This is what happens if you remove a stylesheet file. Dreamweaver lets you
put these little tricks on your page, just by dragging it out of your Behaviors
panel.
For all of my curriculum web pages I have templates, ones
for the text portions, ones for the download pages, ones for the video pages,
and Dreamweaver can link files to templates, so if you are going through changing
your title bar on 10 or so pages, just tweak the template and you can do it
in one step. Dreamweaver will protect the contents of the individual
pages you've created. My sites have 500+ pages all built on a tree of
templates.
Uh oh, did I misspell couture and prêt-à-porter all
over the site? I can search and replace through hundreds of
pages and change it.
Okay, we all understand the basic web site structure: HTML
files, the images that go in the files, audio files, the videos and other HTML
pages either in subfolders or in the same directory. Dreamweaver has
a mini-file explorer window built into the interface called the site panel. You
can create a new site, define a "home folder" for the site on your
hard drive and you can build folders directly in the Dreamweaver file window. The
site setup also lets you put in your web server's information so you can upload
your files without leaving Dreamweaver. All the assets of your web site
such as javascript files, style sheets, images. You can drag files to
other folders in the site panel view, and links will automatically update on
all pages. You can do the same with images and any other files.
Click to enlarge the image. In this screenshot, this file is (was) named index.html. All those other little script files in the scripts folder were put there automatically by Dreaweaver to run the multiple choice question you will see in the Extensions tab next. You have to keep track of these when you upload your files, it's a curse of Dreamweaver: lots of little random files!
You can add on to the program too. You can launch the Exchange and download free add-ons created by other users. Some are simple, free tools
that get used by us every day, like the "Change Case" tool. You
can also purchase robust tools that automate making navigation bars or do
spell check! Best of all are the Learning Interactions. These
are complicated to get to work right, but they include simple drag and drop
games with feedback, simple multiple choice, and other interactions. You
can drag them on to your web page as a little building block, and then set
up the options like the question text and answers, type in a few ones and
zeros for the right and wrong answers, and preview. They will even
talk to an LMS like Moodle if you need them to.
So, does this overview
of Dreamweaver helpful?
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I don't like to have to switch to Flash to make a simple button. But Dreamweaver
will let you have those cool Flash buttons even if you don't have Flash. You can select a template button and just add your label and link and then embed it on the page. You can change the fonts and colors of the button as well.
When we convert a teacher's lecture notes from MS Word, we usually save the
document as HTML in Microsoft Word. Then we open the file in Deamweaver
and use the command "Clean up Word HTML" to take out all the extra
Internet Explorer only code that will break other web browsers. This
also can shrink the file size of a web page by two-thirds (that's how much
junk MS Word creates) and almost guarantees a clean standards-compliant web
page.
After we clean up the crowded HTML code for our Mac users and the ones using older
machines, we apply one of our design templates. We have many since some
pages have special javascripts (little scripting programs that let you add
special features to web pages) on them for pop-up vocabulary bubbles. We
select the template that fits the needs of the course. Since we only have a blank white
page with only bold and italics formatting, we select "Apply Template
to Page" and it gets the usual FIDM eLearning look: background, fonts, colors, navigation bars, and logos.
If everything works right, the headers and subheaders turn into H1's and H2's
and the attached style file is making the H1's go from black Times New Roman
18 pt to purple Verdana bold 16pt. Sometimes it doesn't...as Dreamweaver
has its limits, especially with large sites, but then we can run an error check
to find the offending bit of code.
We'll add images and simple Flash interactions built in Flash or Camtasia,
but since Flash is made by the same company, adding it to your page is simple.
Then we proof, save and upload to the test site for approval, all within the
same application. Soon, we plan to move to a database to store our lecture pages so we don't have as many files laying around, but Dreamweaver will help there too.
Dreamweaver has a very high learning curve and has features that let you
stage data from a database for complex web applications like sorting tables
or building a basic custom ecommerce site. These features usually bury
the basic ones that you need to find every day. The user interface
makes it easy to get lost in the menus and different panels. This is
one of the few applications where I would strongly recommend looking at the
tutorials first before using it.
Some interface elements like splash menus also confuse. When users open
up Dreameaver, they wait a long time, then a dialogue box flashes up offering
about twenty different kinds of pages and templates. I always hit cancel
and select my site in the Site panel, then go File | New to start a page.
Sometimes, the WYSIWYG interface does not quite replicate how it looks on
a browser. This often happens with the extra doo-dads and javascript
that can be added so easily.
Dreamweaver is very powerful but it is not for the first time web page builder. If
you are going to start using it, it helps to be comfortable with web page code
since adding lots of features to your page can confuse the Dreamweaver sometimes. You
can dip into the "code view" that lets you solve this, and it colors
the code so you can spot the offending bit. Read the manuals and watch
the tutorials. I am still discovering new features... Using
Dreamweaver is a commitment and it takes a while to really master it, but once you open it up it is like using the Ferrari of web page editors in my opinion. You would use it to build a medium to large
course website with lots of features, but it has many tools to make it a lot
easier than it looks.
