Product Description

Available for both the Mac and Windows, Macromedia's Dreamweaver 8 is a professional web design and development program used by millions of Internet professionals to build high-quality static and dynamic database-driven web sites. It offers drag-and-drop simplicity, streamlined HTML coding tools, and powerful database integration features. But Dreamweaver 8 is missing one vital component: a printed manual. Enter "Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual", the completely revised fourth edition of this best-selling book by experienced web site trainer, Macromedia Certified instructor, and Dreamweaver Advisory Council member David McFarland. This book enables both first-time and experienced web designers to create visually stunning and highly interactive web sites. With crystal-clear writing and much welcome humor, this new edition offers features such as: live examples with McFarland's step-by-step annotated tutorials, you'll learn how to construct a state-of-the-art commercial web site, complete with working forms, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and dynamic databases; undocumented workarounds and shortcuts for easing the process of building, maintaining, and updating professional web sites; and enables you learn to create virtually every modern web feature, including forms, animations, cascading menus, and more - and you'll find out which browsers you need to provide special coding or do extra testing with. No matter what your level of expertise is, you'll also learn how to manage your entire web site-whether you've just launched or if it's been around for awhile and takes up thousands of pages. Beginners with no web design experience will appreciate the step-by-step guide to designing, organizing, building, and deploying a web site; long-time Dreamweaver users will appreciate the advanced, real-world techniques for controlling the appearance of their web pages with CSS. With more than 500 illustrations, a handcrafted index, and the clarity of thought that has made bestsellers of every Missing Manual to date, this is the ultimate atlas for the complex and powerful Dreamweaver 8.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #212110 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 936 pages

From the Publisher
Macromedia's Dreamweaver 8 is a professional web design and development program offering drag-and-drop simplicity, streamlined HTML coding tools, and powerful database integration features. But Dreamweaver 8 is missing one vital component: a printed manual. Enter Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual, the completely revised fourth edition of this bestselling book by David McFarland. With crystal-clear writing and more than 500 illustrations, it's the ultimate atlas for Dreamweaver 8.

About the Author
David McFarland has been designing web sites since 1995. He's a professional web designer and educator who has worked with the University of California at Berkeley, Intuit, and Macworld magazine among others. He is a frequent speaker at web-related conferences and teaches web design and development at Portland State University. He is a Macromedia Certified instructor and a member of the Dreamweaver Advisory Council.

Excerpted from Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland. Copyright © 2006. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 17 Templates

Some Web designers handcraft sites with loving care, changing layouts, colors, fonts, banners, and navigation from page to page. But that approach isn’t always practical — or desirable. Consistency is a good thing. Web pages that look and act similarly reassure visitors; when only important material changes from page to page, readers can concentrate on finding the information they want. Even more importantly, a handcrafted approach is often unrealistic when you ’re designing on a deadline.

Here ’s where templates come in. Frequently, the underlying design of many pages on many Web sites is identical (see Figure 17-1). For instance, a company Web site with an employee directory may dedicate a single Web page to each employee. Each employee page probably has the same navigation bar, banner, footer, and layout. Only a few particulars differ, like the employee name, photo, and contact information.

Template Basics

Templates let you build pages that share a similar structure and graphic identity, quickly and without having to worry about accidentally deleting or changing elements. Templates come in very handy when you ’re designing a site for which other, less Dreamweaver-savvy individuals are responsible for adding new pages. If you use a template, these underlings can modify only the areas of a page that you, the godlike Dreamweaver guru, define.

Tip: Macromedia Contribute, a simple, word processor –like program for updating Web sites, works very well with sites built using Dreamweaver templates. If you build sites that are updated by people who don ’t know the first thing about Dreamweaver or building Web pages, Contribute can help. You can find more information about this program at Macromedia ’s Web site:macromedia.com/contribute/.

A new page based on a template —also called a template instance, or child page — looks just like the template, except that you can edit only certain areas of the page, called, logically enough, editable regions .In the example shown in Figure 17-1,one editable region includes the question-and-answer text area; the rest of the page remains untouched and is, in fact, locked.

A Dreamweaver template can be very basic: one or more areas of a page (the edit-able regions) can be changed, others can ’t (locked regions ).But Dreamweaver also includes many subtle ways for controlling template instances. Here ’s an overview of the features you’ll encounter when creating and using templates:

•Editable regions. These are the basic building blocks of a template. An editable region is a part of a page —a paragraph, table cell, or headline, for example — that people can change on each template instance. A template page can have multiple editable regions —for example, one in a sidebar area and another in the main content section of a page.

•Editable tag attributes. There may be times when you want to make a particular tag property editable. For instance, if you want to specify a different background color for each page, you’ll want to permit changes to the

tag ’s Bgcolor property, or let people set the tag ’s class property to a particular CSS class style.

Or perhaps you’ve built a template that includes a photo with some complex formatting (left-aligned by a Cascading Style Sheet, perhaps).Turning the entire image into an editable region could pose problems: When someone creates a new page from the template and then inserts a new photo, all of the formatting information can get lost. Instead, you could make just the image ’s Src property editable. People would then be able to insert new images for each page without inadvertently ruining the photo ’s formatting.(If the Width and Height properties vary from image to image, you could also make those attributes editable.)

•Repeating regions and repeating tables. Some Web pages include lists of items: catalogs of products, lists of news articles, albums of photos, ad so on. Dreamweaver lets you define repeatable regions for pages like this.

For example, a page of product listings can include a picture, name, and price for each product in a catalog, organized using a table with multiple rows (Chapter 7).

As template builder, you may not know in advance how many products the page will eventually list, so you can ’t fully design the page. However, you can use Dreamweaver to define a row —or any selection of HTML —as a repeating region, so that page authors can add new rows of product information when needed.

•Optional regions and editable optional regions. Optional regions make templates even more flexible. They let you show or hide content on a page-by-page basis.

Suppose you create a template for your company ’s products. When some products go on sale (but others remain full price), you could add an optional region on the template that displays a big "On Sale!" logo. When you create a new product page, you could show the optional region for products that are on sale and keep it hidden for the others.

Editable optional regions are similar, but they have the added benefit of being editable. Maybe you ’re creating a template for an employee directory, giving each employee a separate Web page with contact information. Some employees also want their picture displayed on the page, while others don ’t (you know the type). Solution: Add an editable optional region that would let you show the space for a photo and add a different photo for each page. For the shyer types, you would simply hide the photo area entirely.

Customer Reviews

I thought I knew it all (well most of it)
I thought I knew Dreamweaver pretty well and I bought this book to learn some of the bells and whistles, how wrong I was. I decided to start at the beginning and soom learnt that although I could drive Dreamweaver I wasn't always taking the most effective route.

As a result of following the advice in this book, I now have a much easier to maintain web-site and I have actually reduced the supporting code, making it faster to load to my viewers browser.

There are excellent step-by-step tutorials at the end of the key chapters and they consolidate the key new learning points into practical application.

An excellent book and I will certainly look at others in the series.

Excellent guide to Dreamweaver
I am totally new to designing Web pages, and was always told not to get Dreamweaver as it is tricky to use.
This book has made Dreamweaver so easy to understand. The book also includes tutorials and links to downloadable files to give you hands-on practice.
I would definitely recommend this book.

Brilliant book
I am fairly new to Webdesign and Dreamweaver, and feel I have come a long long way thanks to this book. The author David McFarland clearly has a serious mastery of Web Design and Dreamweaver, and does a good job of explaining every aspect of the program. Also, as brilliant as Dreamweaver is, there are still a few features that are best avoided, for various reasons. McFarland is not afraid of pointing out any such features.
I highly recommend this book.