Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In this chapter, you’ve learned about how the Internet came to be, and also many important things you need to do before working with Dreamweaver. You’ve also read overviews on XHTML and CSS—technologies that will prove essential as you work your way through the book. In the next chapter, we’ll take a look at Dreamweaver itself, so you can learn how to create a new document and you can familiarize yourself with the application’s interface.

You should now be comfortable working with Dreamweaver’s interface, tweaking its preferences, and creating new documents. However, documents need a home, so in the next chapter we’ll be looking at how to set up a site in Dreamweaver.

In this chapter, you learned how to set up a site and how to work with files in Dreamweaver’s Files panel. It’s a good idea to experiment with the various options, and with uploading and downloading files, to get comfortable with file management—you’ll be doing a lot of this when you start working on a live site. Speaking of which, the next chapter covers the background you’ll need to create web pages—the essential components of web pages and sites, including all the “behind the scenes” elements that are so important when creating successful pages.

In this chapter, you’ve taken a big step towards working using modern methods. Along with learning how to set up web page defaults, including a number of extremely important elements that many web designers wrongly ignore, you should now be familiar with the workings of CSS and be able to create and edit CSS rules. Make sure you’re familiar with the sections on creating and editing CSS styles from this chapter, because this book returns to the same dialog boxes numerous times in the chapters that follow. Next, we’re going to continue working with web page content, concentrating on web page text.

In this chapter you’ve learned how to work with website text, ensuring that it’s structurally sound and logically marked-up, and that it looks good. The exercises have shown you how to make sure text remains accessible, while still maintaining a good degree of control as a designer. You should now be comfortable experimenting with the various text-oriented elements of the CSS Style Definition dialog box, so try creating a number of variations on the exercises in this chapter, combining different elements to create brand-new results. In the next chapter, we will take a look at the other main component of website content: images.

In this chapter, you’ve learned how to approach using images on your web pages, found out about the different image formats available, discovered various means of adding images to pages and editing them in Dreamweaver, and you also now know a number of ways to style them using CSS. In combination with the previous chapter, you now have the means to create the bulk of your website’s content. In the next chapter, we’ll explore the main area of web page interactivity, by looking at how to create navigation for your websites.

If you’ve worked through this entire chapter, you’ll now have the knowledge to create arguably the most important interactive element of any website: its links. You should now be comfortable with creating typical web page links, but also a number of different navigation bars. In addition, you have also learned how to use links for creating some dynamic on-page content: swapping an image by clicking a thumbnail. Try experimenting with the different exercises, adding your own styles and images. Remember that this book aims to teach in a modular manner—once you’ve created a single rollover navigation bar that works, you should be able to rapidly adapt it to work on any website, rather than always having to start from scratch. The next chapter is the final piece in learning how to create the bulk of website pages—you’ve already learned about typography, images, links, and navigation, so now it’s time to deal with general web page layout, so you can position on the screen all the elements you’ve learned how to create so far.

This chapter is effectively the one that adds the final puzzle piece, enabling you to create full web page layouts. You can now combine your knowledge of how to work with CSS-based columns and page layouts with what you learned about working with text, images, and links over the past few chapters. In addition, you should now be comfortable creating and styling tables using Dreamweaver—but you should also be aware that tables should only be used for tabular data and not for web page layouts. In Chapter 10, you’ll see how to take various elements from the chapters in this book and combine them into effective web page layouts. First, however, Chapter 9 takes a look at getting user feedback by creating website forms that a user can fill in and submit to contact you.

We’ve covered plenty of ground here, and you should now be comfortable creating forms and setting one up to collect user feedback from a website. Now it’s time to move on to the next chapter, which shows how to combine many of the elements of web design explored in this book to create cuttingedge web page layouts and templates in Dreamweaver.