Certificate in Introduction to Dreamweaver CS6 Online Course

The Dreamweaver Interface

Your first lesson will introduce you to one of Dreamweaver's greatest strengths: its clean, simple interface. Not only will you learn the primary interface elements, you'll also find out how to preview your work in multiple Web browsers—because rigorous testing is the key to a successful website. By testing and adapting your site documents across multiple browsers, you'll ensure that every site visitor, regardless of their browser, has a positive user experience.

Setting Up Your Local Site

Dreamweaver is a site creation and management tool, not just some glorified HTML editor. While you're building a site, Dreamweaver has the ability to track each color you assign, every image and multimedia file you insert, every Web address you refer to, as well as every step you take while working on a specific document. Dreamweaver then keeps all this information right at your fingertips to use again and again. In today's lesson, you'll learn the steps you need to take to put these features to work for you.

Inserting Text

The two most important aspects of any website are what it says and how it looks. In this lesson on structuring text, you'll learn how to group blocks of text into elements such as headings, paragraphs, and lists. In certain respects, structuring text with Dreamweaver is very similar to working in your word processor. It's important to understand, however, that Dreamweaver is not a word processor. And perhaps more importantly, word processing and Web design are totally different worlds. This lesson also includes an introduction to HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language.

Working With CSS

When HTML was first created, nobody thought the Web would become what it is today. HTML was simply meant to be a fast and easy way for folks to format simple documents (black text on a white page). Cascading Style Sheets take us beyond that. Today you'll get a short introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS for short), and you'll gain an understanding of how to implement CSS using Dreamweaver. We'll explore the basics behind how CSS works and how to use it to format, or style, your page text.

Working With Images

Believe it or not, early Web browsers couldn't display images. It's doubtful the Web would have become so popular if that were still true today. In this lesson, you'll learn how to use Dreamweaver to insert and format images within your documents. Even though Dreamweaver isn't a true image-editing application, it does offer some very impressive editing tools, and we'll explore these features today as well.

Creating Navigational Elements

Well-structured navigation elements are the backbone of every successful website. In the past, designers attempted to make their navigation elements stand out using various image and JavaScript-based effects, more often than not guaranteeing that their navigation was anything but well structured. Fortunately, there's a cure: list-based navigation elements. In this lesson, you'll expand your CSS horizons and discover how to format your structured lists any way you like.

Working With Tables

We use tables to display data—columns and rows of information with headings and borderlines, just like the typical spreadsheet. In the dark ages before WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors, digging through the long and complex code required to render a table on screen was mind-bending at best. With a tool like Dreamweaver, table editing becomes a snap. And in this lesson, you'll see just how true that statement is.

Introduction to User Forms

You've probably filled out a Web form before. Forms allow site visitors to input their information and send it to the Web server. For the Web server to use the data visitors enter, there must be a processing script on the server. This script, or groups of scripts, accepts the data and does something with it. But in order to use a form, you first need to build it. In today's lesson, we'll focus on the creation of form pages, their formatting, and their layout.

Introduction to CSS Page Layout

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the core of modern Web design. In this lesson, we'll examine some Web design principles and explore page layout using CSS. In the process, you'll get acquainted with the tools Dreamweaver uses to do some of our coding.

Working With the Assets and History Panels

In today's lesson, we'll explore ways to speed up your work flow and easily reuse content with the help of Dreamweaver's Assets and History panels. You'll learn how to use the Assets panel to quickly access elements and get them into new pages, so you don't have to go hunting through your site for previously used content. When we explore the History panel, you'll learn how to undo anything you wish you hadn't done, as well as repeat formatting procedures throughout your site.

Site Management and Maintenance

In the life cycle of a website, the design and development period is the most fun. It's also the shortest. You spend much more time managing and maintaining your site. Dreamweaver appreciates this reality and has put as much thought and effort into its site management and maintenance tools as it has into its development tools. In today's lesson, you'll learn how to use Dreamweaver's site management tools to connect to your Web server and to upload and download files. You'll also find out how to use Check-In and Check-Out, which let workgroups develop sites together without overwriting content. And you'll discover how to attach design notes to your files, so you and fellow workers can communicate across conflicting work schedules.

Strategies for Planning Your Site

You now have an introductory knowledge of Dreamweaver, and you know just enough to be dangerous. We'll spend our last lesson together going over site planning. You'll learn the five basic questions that you'll need to answer before starting any website project. We'll discuss where and how to gather your site content (text, graphics, and other media), as well as different strategies for organizing that content once you have it. By the time you finish this lesson, no matter what type of website you need to build, you'll know exactly how to plan for its success!