I’ve put together a short Flash movie demonstrating the process of defining a site in Dreamweaver. (It also points out a potentially catastrophic error that I’ve seen people make time and time again.)
Windows users move along–this doesn’t effect you.
But Mac users may want to know that the version 8.01 updater for Dreamweaver 8 (available here) disables a pretty good feature: the ability to print the code of a page or other type of file. While not an absolutely necessary feature, it can come in handy when you want to distribute samples of HTML code–like when distributing example code to a class like I often do.
However, the updated 8.01 version does bring performance and stability improvements to the Mac, so it’s probably a worthwhile upgrade anyway.
If you ‘ve been frustrated when trying to print out your code, that’s probably the reason why. You can find out more on the Adobe/Macromedia web site: Click here for the Tech Note/
If you use Dreamweaver’s Insert Bar you can click to add most of the HTML you need to build a great Web page—images, tables, div tags, forms and so on. But if you’re like me, you probably don’t even use half of the buttons on the “Common” tab, let alone the Insert Bar’s less frequently visited categories like “Text” or “HTML.” Fortunately, the Insert bar offers a one-stop spot for collecting your most commonly inserted elements: the Favorites tab. To access the tab, just make sure the Insert bar is open (Window→Insert) and select Favorites from the bar’s left-hand pull down menu.
To add items to the tab, right-click (Ctrl-click on Mac) on the bar and select “Customize Favorites” to open the “Customize Favorite Objects” window. The left side of the window lists all of the different objects (like image, table, and so on) from the many different tabs of the Insert bar. Select an object you use frequently, press the >> button to move it onto the right-hand list of your Favorites.
You can reorder the list using the up and down arrows, remove an object from the list by selecting it and pressing the garbage can icon, and even add a seperator line to gather related objects into groups. Once you’re done adding favorites, click the OK button, and your new “modded-out” favorites bar is ready for action.
I’ll be presenting several Dreamweaver sessions at the NAB Web & Mobile Development Conference on April 25 and 26, 2006. This mini-conference, part of the much larger National Association of Broadcasters convention emphasizes Flash and video, but I’ll be by giving 3 talks on best practices with Dreamweaver, creating CSS with Dreamweaver, and using Dreamweaver with XML and RSS. For more information visit: www.nabshow.com/conferences/webmobile.asp.
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