Datasheet

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Part I: Creating Great Web Sites
a little like the plastic Pink Flamingos stuck in the front yards of so many
homes in South Florida; some people love how kitsch they are, others just
think they’re tacky. Although frames still have a place on the Web, many
designers don’t like them because they can make navigation confusing for
visitors and make it difficult to link to pages within a site.
If you want to create pages like the one in Figure 1-4 that display multiple
Web pages in one browser window, you’ll find everything you need in
Chapter 8.
Creating dynamic Web sites
When you use Dreamweaver’s most advanced features, you can create Web
sites (like the one shown in Figure 1-5) that connect to a database and dis-
play content dynamically on a Web page.
What’s happening behind the scenes of a site like the one at www.
TotalTraining.com gets complicated fast, but one of the advantages
of using this kind of technology is that you can create a Web page like the
one in Figure 1-5 that displays a collection of products and then display
product information for each product individually, drawing the product
photos and other details from a database as a user requests the infor-
mation. When a site grows bigger than about 100 pages, graduating to a
database-driven model like this is far more efficient than creating individual
static pages for every product description or other content in your site.
Dreamweaver supports many technologies for this kind of site development,
including PHP, JSP, ASP.NET, and ASP.
In addition to drawing content from a database, you can also create interac-
tive features that display content created by visitors to your site, such as an
online discussion board or any other system that collects data in one page
and then uses that data to determine what’s displayed on another page.
That’s how the most advanced sites on the Web do things like remind you of
the last book you searched for or keep track of your order as you select prod-
ucts in an online shopping cart. Although I can’t cover all these advanced fea-
tures in this book, you find an introduction to creating database-driven Web
sites in Chapters 14 and 15.
One other thing I feel compelled to mention at this point is that most of the
big, complicated Web sites in the world were created by a team of develop-
ers, not just one person. In the case of the Total Training site, a great team of
people was involved in the many elements of the site, from the design, to the
videos, to the programming. If you’re working with a team of developers, you
may appreciate Dreamweaver’s site management features, such as the ability
to check pages in and out so that no one overwrites anyone else’s work. You
find information about these features in Chapter 4.
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