Datasheet

site, what should be included, and how the site should be organized. A good
brainstorming session is a nonjudgmental free-for-all — a chance for everyone
involved to share all the ideas they can think of, whether realistic or not.
Not discrediting ideas at the brainstorming stage is important. Often an unre-
alistic idea leads to an innovation that no one may have thought of other-
wise, especially when you’re working on the Internet, where the best ideas
are almost always new ones.
After a brainstorming session like this, you’ll probably have a long list of pos-
sible features to develop into your site. Your next challenge is to edit that list
to the most important ones and then plan your course of development to
ensure that everything will work well together when you’re finished.
Customizing the Workspace
in Dreamweaver CS3
Dreamweaver can seem a bit overwhelming at first. It has so many features,
and they are spread out in so many panels, toolbars, and dialog boxes that
you can easily get lost. If you prefer to understand by poking around, have at
it (and feel free to skip ahead to the next chapter, where you start building
your first Web page right away). If you want a tour before you get started,
the last few sections of this chapter introduce you to the interface and are
designed to give you a quick overview of the features in this powerful program.
When you launch Dreamweaver, the Start screen appears in the main area of
the program (and reappears anytime you don’t have a file open unless you
close it permanently by selecting the Don’t Show Again option). From the
Start screen, you can choose to create a new page from one of the many
Dreamweaver predesigned sample files, or you can create a new blank page
by selecting HTML from the Create New options in the middle column. When
you select HTML, Dreamweaver creates a new blank HTML page in the main
workspace, as shown in Figure 1-8.
You build HTML pages, templates, style sheets, and other files in the work-
space, which consists of a main window that shows the page you’re working
on surrounded by a number of panels and menus that provide tools you can
use to design and develop your pages. The Dreamweaver workspace consists
of the following basic components: the menu bar (at the very top), the Insert
bar (just below it), the Document window (the main area of the screen, just
below the Insert bar), the Property inspector (at the bottom of the screen),
and the vertical docking panels (to the right of the Document window) that
expand and collapse as needed. More detailed descriptions of each of these
follows.
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Chapter 1: The Many Ways to Design a Web Page
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