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We have put some basic Dreamweaver tips together on this page to help you:
Tips and tutorials on tables, forms, CSS Styles and more
CSS Styles
Instead of using endless font tags, use CSS Styles in Dreamweaver to format text in your site. You can also use CSS Styles to create text rollovers and remove the underline from links.
Links
- Change the link colors from the default blue link color by going to Modify>Page Properties. Here you can change the link color, visited link color and active link color. All your links will change to the link color specified.
- Have you ever wondered how to get a text rollover on a link? The answer is to use the a:hover style!
- You can link to a particular section of a page by using a feature called Named Anchors. E.g. If I want a link to Rollovers I would link to this same page but would add a named anchor to go to the section Rollovers. Here's how you add an anchor. Position your cursor at the point you want the link to go to and click on Insert>Named Anchors. Give the anchor an appropriate name (in this case we would name it 'rollovers'). Now while linking all you need to do is add the # symbol along with the name of the anchor. An anchor is understood by HTML by the # symbol.
Customizing Form Objects and Validating Forms
You can give a background color and font type to form objects using CSS Styles in Dreamweaver. You can also validate forms using Dreamweaver behaviors.
Tables
- Making table rows with heights less than 15 pixels sometimes seems impossible. Especially in Netscape! Here's a great tip - all you need to do is insert a transparent gif in your row and all your heights will be fine. You can find a transparent image called a shim in your Fireworks file. This is just a 1 pixel x 1 pixel gif. You could also export a transparent image from Fireworks.
- Have you ever wondered how to get a nice thin border instead of the thick border that is automatically generated using the 'border' property? Or have you ever wanted only the table to have a border and not all the cells. Well the answer to this is to make a table with the width you want and 1 as your cell padding. You then have to insert the actual table inside this table with width 100%.
Custom Submit Buttons
Have you ever wondered how to create custom 'Submit' or 'Go' buttons in Dreamweaver? Well, It's really simple. All you need to do is create your custom image, save it and in Dreamweaver click on Insert>Form Object>Image Field, to choose the submit button image. You now have your customized submit button. The code will look like this:
Rollovers
Rollovers are very easy using Dreamweaver. All you need to do is export two images from Fireworks (the image itself and the rollover image). Next, in Dreamweaver, click on Insert>Rollover Image. Give a name to the image, choose the images from the folder icon and finally give the link to the image. That's it! You've now got a great looking effect for your site.
Best Time Saving Tips in Dreamweaver
The best time saving tips in Dreamweaver are to use
- Dreamweaver templates and
- Server Side Includes
Check Broken Links Throughout The Site
Before uploading your site you need to make sure that there are no dead links in the site. You can do this by going to your site map, right clicking on any of the files and then clicking on 'check links'. Now you can choose to either check links in the entire site or within the selected file or folder. If there are any dead links you can fix them by using the folder icon to select the right files.
Spaces
If you need to go to the very next line and not to a new paragraph use use Shift+Enter instead of Enter.
Ctrl + Shift + Space gives you more than one space between characters
Bullet Shapes and Types
Customize bullets by using the Type attribute in the tag
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- Point 1
- Point 2
E.g.would give you a square bullet rather than the default circular bullet.
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Resizing Images
After resizing an image in Dreamweaver, click on Commands>Optimize Image in Fireworks. You will get a dialog box saying 'Editing image.gif. Do you wish to use an existing Fireworks document as the source of image.gif.' Click on No and then click Update. The image is now updated and optimized in Dreamweaver. This saves you the trouble of opening the image in Fireworks, resizing it and exporting it again.
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