Datasheet

books and training programs when you finish with this one. Entire books and

Web sites are dedicated to creating layouts that work on a variety of comput-

ers and browsers.

Because you’re reading this book, I assume you are relatively new to Web

design or looking for a refresher course and a chance to update your skills

with CSS and the new features in Dreamweaver CS3, so I begin with the

basics. In the next sections of this chapter, you find a few tips and sugges-

tions for planning a Web site. At the end of this chapter, you find an introduc-

tion to Dreamweaver’s interface.

Over the course of the nearly 400 pages that follow, you find a variety of

approaches to Web design, from old-school techniques like tables and frames

to the newest and most advanced features like CSS and multimedia.

Developing a New Site

In a nutshell, building a Web site involves creating individual pages and link-

ing them to other pages. You need to have a home page (the first page visi-

tors will see when they arrive at your URL) and that page needs to bring

them into the rest of the pages of the site, usually with links to each of the

main sections of the site. Those pages, in turn, link to subsections that can

then lead to deeper subsections.

A big part of planning a Web site is determining how to divide the pages of

your site into sections and how those sections should link to one another.

Dreamweaver makes creating pages and setting links easy, but how you orga-

nize the pages is up to you.

If you’re new to this, you may think you don’t need to worry much about how

your Web site will grow and develop. Think again. All good Web sites grow,

and the bigger they get, the harder they are to manage. Planning the path of

growth for your Web site before you begin can make a tremendous difference

later. Neglecting to think about growth is probably one of the most common

mistakes among new designers. This becomes even more serious when more

than one person is working on the same site. Without a clearly established

site organization and some common conventions for tasks such as naming

files, confusion reigns.

Managing your site’s structure

Managing the structure of a Web site has two sides: the side that users

see, which depends on how you set up links, and the behind-the-scenes

side, which depends on how you organize files and folders.

Part I: Creating Great Web Sites

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