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.

August 27, 2009

Using DataBound Controls In ASP.Net 3.5

Filed under: ASP.Net — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 10:32 am

Displaying data on a web page which is bound to information in a database is a very common requirement in web applications. In ASP.NET version 1, the main control for achieving this was the DataGrid. In the current release of ASP.NET, version 3.5, the DataGrid is conspicuously absent from the Toolbox in Visual Web Developer. In fact, although the DataGrid can still be used in ASP.NET pages and will work fine, it is now deprecated. The good news is that there is a good choice of more powerful new controls which have taken its place. Four of these controls (GridView, DataList, Repeater and List View) are suitable for displaying multiple records from a data source and then there are another two (FormView and DetailsView) which are used to display only one record at a time.

The GridView control is the workhorse of ASP.NET’s DataBound controls. It displays data items in an automatically-generated table and has a rich set of easily-configurable options.  Options include the ability to customize columns and to include custom content in columns such as images or any other relevant HTML column. Command columns can also be added containing links which will enable the user to edit and delete records. The control also supports paging and sorting.

The DataList control also automatically generates a table when it produces its output. However, unlike the GridView control, it allows the display of more than one record per row using its RepeatColumns property. The DataList is also template-driven, requiring the use of an ItemTemplate containing dynamic data. The elements placed inside the ItemTemplate are rendered once for each item in the bound data.

The Repeater Control also uses an ItemTemplate element to format its output. However, since it does not automatically generate a table, it offers considerable flexibility of layout. Output can be rendered as paragraphs, as a series of DIV elements, an ordered list, an unordered list or a customized table.

The ListView control, introduced with ASP.NET 3.5, also uses templates for displaying its output. However, it is far more sophisticated, allowing the use of a variety of templates, for example: a LayoutTemplate for specifying the overall container for the data; an ItemTemplate for specifying the rendering of each item of data; an ItemSeparator template, used to specify the content displayed between items of data; and so on. The ListView control also supports paging, sorting and editing records as well as the creation of new records.

Of the two controls used to display single items of data, the DetailsView resembles GridView in that it displays its output in an automatically-generated HTML table. The other single record data bound control, the FormView, resembles the ListView control, in that it is entirely template driven. Both of the single record controls support paging and sorting and allow you to edit and delete records as well as adding new ones.

Author’s company runs ASP.NET training courses in London and throughout the UK.

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