Software Articles

November 21, 2010

Web Design Courses Can Kick-Start Your Web Development Career

Filed under: Dreamweaver — Tags: , , , — admin @ 12:09 am

If you are a business owner you may wonder how web design training can help your business succeed. If you are involved with a computer related business, it can be easier to see how it will benefit you. However, even if you are not directly involved with computers, web design in general can be a benefit to you professionally and personally.

If you have a business that you are trying to promote, a web site can be essential to your advertising methods. It allows you to reach a much wider client base than you would be able to reach through standard media advertising, and it can allow you to present a larger number of goods or a larger amount of information that you would be able to through a print or television advertisement.

Good web design is important but it can be expensive. You can expect to pay anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a basic website to thousands for a complicated or involved design. And by allowing an outside company to design your website you are letting go of the control you have over the finished product. It can be easy and worthwhile to look into web design courses through online learning sites or through community colleges.

If you want to learn business related web design applications, you should concentrate on courses such as writing for search engine optimization, e commerce related programs and general site design concepts so that you can generate a professional and logically designed website. Web designers that are making a career of the business learn basic design principles, information on incorporating images and video, and special applications such as flash animation.

Even if you are more interested learning to design websites for yourself and relatives there are some principals that will carry through from the commercial side of the business. You will want to make sure that your site will load well no matter what the connection speed is of the people viewing it. You will also want to make sure that people can find the information they are looking for. Web design training can help you achieve all of these things and more.

Even if you complete your training you should keep in mind that you may need to take refresher courses from time to time. You need to make sure that you are up to date on new operating systems or changes and developments that take place when new versions of programs are released.

If you are interested in web design training, you may be surprised at how easy and fun the courses are. From a starter course in basic web design to building complex sites with multiple pages, you can find a course which gives you the information and the training that you need.

Dreamweaver Web Design courses.

November 14, 2010

How Dreamweaver Templates Speed Up Web Development

Filed under: Dreamweaver — Tags: , , — admin @ 1:06 am

Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 templates are one of the most powerful development aids that the program contains. Basically, a template is a master design which can be copied repeatedly to generate an boundless number of web pages all containing the same shared elements. Unsurprisingly, each time the template generates a new page, the page can be customised and the requisite elements added to it to make it unique. This is achieved by a scheme of locked page regions and editable regions.

When the template is applied to a page, locked regions cannot be modified. (You have to return to the template to adjust them.) Only the areas of the page designated as editable regions can have content added to them.

To create an editable region anywhere on the template, you simply position the cursor in the desired part of the layout and choose Insert – Template Objects – Editable Region. Enter a name for the new region and click OK. One frequent problem experienced by new users of Dreamweaver is the accidental positioning of and editable region inside a heading or paragraph tag. This means that when the template is applied to a page, only text can be placed in the editable region. To fix this problem, return to the template, click in the editable region and examine the Tag Selector on the left of the Status bar. Having located the offending tag (usually h1, h2, p, etc.), right-click on it and choose Remove Tag from the context menu.

To associate an existing page with a template, open the page and choose Modify – Templates – Apply Template to Page. Next, double-click on the name of the template to be applied. Strangely enough, there is no Dreamweaver command that enables you to apply a template to several pages at once. However, here are two suggestions for applying a template to multiple pages reasonably quickly.

Begin by selecting multiple pages in the Files panel using the classic techniques of Shift-click or Control-click (Command-click on a Mac). Then, you can right-click one of the selected files and choose Open from the context menu to open all of them. Next, activate the Assets panel (Window – Assets) and click on the Templates button (the second icon from the bottom). Finally, drag the icon of the required template onto each of the open pages. To speed up the process, use Control-Tab to switch from page to page.

To create a brand new page based on a template, choose New from the File menu and, when the New Document window appears, select the Page From Template option, click on the site that contains the template (It should already be highlighted.), then choose the template. To get the most benefit from a template, before clicking the Create button, make sure that the option “Update Page When Template Changes” is activated.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 training courses.

April 10, 2010

Demystify Web Development With Adobe Dreamweaver CS4

Filed under: Computers — Tags: , , , , , — Chris Mason @ 8:45 pm

Adobe Dreamweaver has quickly established itself as the leading website creation software available on the market today. There are many organisations as well as individuals that long to have their own website but cannot afford the services of a professional web design company. With Adobe Dreamweaver, nearly anyone can successfully build a web presence. Adobe Dreamweaver is relatively simple to use, pays attention to current web standards, and allows even the less experienced web builder to put together a good looking, functional website.

Just as the use of a graphical interface has changed computing, making it more user-friendly, the use of Adobe Dreamweaver renders people with limited understanding of web construction capable of putting together a quality site. It is also an excellent platform for learning how web sites should be put together. For example, when you create a new page, Dreamweaver lets you choose from a series of standard layouts based on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), the recommended specification for creating web pages. The code produced by Dreamweaver contains useful comments explaining how the page layout works.

Many small organisations have already learned to rely on Adobe Dreamweaver to build and manage their own website, creating and modifying pages and then uploading them via FTP to make them live and available to the public. Those organisations with a more urgent need to establish a web presence may still turn to professional web development companies to get them started and then use Adobe Dreamweaver when changes need to be made, often saving themselves a small fortune.

Another way that companies can save a few bucks is by commissioning web designers to create Dreamweaver templates and then using these templates in-house to build the website themselves. This also has the benefit of allowing organizations to maintain control of their site from the outset.

Although Dreamweaver is simple to use, it is unlikely that the average user can simple load it onto their machine and start using it effectively. Most people will benefit from having some Dreamweaver training. This will show them which are the essential aspects of the program and the process of creating a basic site and making it live. A good Dreamweaver training course will also give users an overview of the many web technologies, the underlying code, which Dreamweaver automatically generates as the users visually create their web pages.

One of the best ways to make a site useful for visitors is making it interactive, allowing users to search for the specific content that they want. By attending an advanced Dreamweaver training course, staff within an organization can learn to add database-driven content to their website using technologies such as ASP, PHP or ColdFusion. And, here again, Dreamweaver does the lion’s share of the work, allowing users to create sophisticated search and results pages using the same simple point-and-click and drag-and-drop techniques used to create basic content.

Click here for Adobe Dreamweaver training courses.

October 1, 2009

Working With Editable Regions On Dreamweaver Templates

Filed under: Dreamweaver — Tags: , , , — Chris Mason @ 5:46 pm

A Dreamweaver template is a blueprint for a web page which can provide a mechanism for creating and updating multiple pages with a common layout. Any of the web page types that Dreamweaver handles can be made into a template: HTML, ASP, ASPX, CFM OR JSP. Templates consist of fixed regions and editable regions. The fixed regions are those parts of the page which contain elements which will be identical on all pages based on the templates: things such as logos, navigation bars, headers and footers. The editable regions are those areas of the page which can be modified each time a page is created and based on the template.

When creating your template, there is no need to specify which regions of the page will be locked when the template is applied to a page. The entire page will be locked by default and, hence, if you save a template that has no editable regions, a dialog box will appear reminding you that the template is pretty much useless until you insert at least one editable region.

To create an editable region, position the cursor in the required location and choose Insert – Template Objects – Editable Region. A dialog box will appear prompting you to enter a name. Enter any descriptive name and click the OK button.

As to where editable regions should be placed, there are two main scenarios: you can create a free region or a bound one. By a free region, I mean one in which you can enter any content you like; by a bound one, I mean one where the content you enter is limited. For example, if you want to create an editable region into which you can insert the main content of each page, you would probably be placing your editable region inside a DIV element. However, if you want to create an editable region to allow users to insert just a heading, you would place your editable region inside an H1 element.

The element inside which you place your editable region is of paramount importance and it is very easy to accidentally place an editable region inside a paragraph of heading element by mistake. In fact, Dreamweaver will always display an alert if any template that you save has an editable region inside a paragraph or heading element.

There are two simple ways of keeping track of where your editable region is being inserted. The first is to switch to Code view and double-check where your cursor is positioned. The second is, while in Design view, look at the tag selector. This is the area at the bottom of the document window on the left of the status bar. The last tag displayed on the tag selector is the one inside which your cursor is currently positioned. If the last tag displayed is P for paragraph or H1, H2, etc., simple right click on the unwanted tag and choose Remove Tag from the context menu.

Click here for Dreamweaver Training in London or call 0800 1950 502.

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