Web Tutorials

I've completed Adobe's Developer Connection tutorial Creating Your First Website in Dreamweaver CS4.

I'm used to creating CSS by hand, as like when I design table-based eblasts at work, which seems to have been a great point of entry in learning code. What I've learned about designing eblasts might be worth it's own post, for sure. Very interesting stuff.

So what was new to me here was Dreamweaver's CSS style palette which allows you to change and apply the styles on the fly. And when you use this palette it not only applies the styles right away to your html source code, but it also updates the linked external style sheet...very intuitive. Also learned in this area was the ability to position div tags in a layout using CSS and not table structure, something I was keen to start to learn.

Similar to the CSS styles palette is the Files palette. If used to manage files, instead of managing them outside Dreamweaver, it will relink and auto-update across your predefined site which is pretty cool.

I was also introduced to Spry elements. Are these element specific only to Adobe products? I think so. In this case we used a dropdown javascript menu bar. And then modified the associated CSS. Pretty complex but the tutorial points you to the only files you will need, so that helps. I don't know how much I'll be interested in using these items in the future.

I read somewhere that you should do tutorial with your own files. So having done this once, I might do it again to with my own files and post the results to my server. Stay tuned.