Introduction to Dreamweaver CS5

About This Course

If you want to design professional-quality Web sites, this is the class for you! In these step-by-step lessons, you'll build an in-class Web site using Adobe Dreamweaver CS5—and in the process, you'll discover how to plan a Web site from the ground up.

As you create your site, you'll explore the Dreamweaver interface and find out how to make it work for you. You'll discover how to use Dreamweaver's What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG, or "wizzy-wig") features to eliminate the drudgery of hand-coding, while learning how to quickly access your code when you want to.

You'll work alongside an industry professional as you master skills ranging from using Cascading Style Sheets to creating standards-compliant pages. You'll examine site planning strategies, learn principles of good Web design, and explore Dreamweaver's best practices for maintaining Web sites once they're online. By the time you're done, you'll be using this powerful software tool with skill and confidence.

About The Instructor

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Robert Fuller.

Robert Fuller is a veteran Web developer, educator, and author. His corporate experience extends from Silicon Alley to Silicon Valley, where he has held almost every post from intern to senior developer. He has logged tens of thousands of classroom hours, teaching online and at the collegiate and corporate levels. Robert has had the good fortune of being published throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. His titles include Dreamweaver Virtual Classroom and HTML Virtual Classroom for McGraw-Hill/Osborne, and The Photoshop Bible (standard and professional editions for both CS2 and CS3) and HTML in 10 Simple Steps or Less for John Wiley & Sons.

Syllabus

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week 1

Wednesday - Lesson 01

Perhaps Adobe Dreamweaver's greatest strengths are its powerful tools and its clean, simple interface. Our first lesson is all about introducing you to that interface. Not only will you learn the primary interface elements, but you'll also find out how to preview your work in multiple Web browsers—because rigorous testing is the key to a successful Web site. 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.

Friday - Lesson 02

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.

Week 2

Wednesday - Lesson 03

The two most important aspects of any Web site 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 like 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, HyperText Markup Language.

Friday - Lesson 04

HTML defines the structure of a Web page. 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). Web design wasn't even a thought. Today you'll get a short introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and 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.

Week 3

Wednesday - Lesson 05

Believe it or not, the very early Web browsers couldn't display images, and 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.

Friday - Lesson 06

Well-structured navigation elements are the backbone of every successful Web site. 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, we'll expand our CSS horizons and discover how to format our structured lists any way we like.

Week 4

Wednesday - Lesson 07

Find out how to insert and format standard tables. Tables are used to display data—columns and rows of information with headings and borderlines, just like the typical spreadsheet. In the dark ages of pre-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.

Friday - Lesson 08

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.

Week 5

Wednesday - Lesson 09

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the core of Web design. In this lesson, we'll examine some Web design principles and explore page layout using CSS. We'll also get acquainted with Dreamweaver's exceptional CSS tools that do the coding for us.

Friday - Lesson 10

Today's lesson is all about reusability, and in Dreamweaver, that means the 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 redo anything you want so that you can repeat formatting procedures throughout your site.

Week 6

Wednesday - Lesson 11

In the life cycle of a Web site, the design and development period is the most fun. Unfortunately, it's also the shortest. In the long run, you'll spend much more time managing and maintaining your site. Dreamweaver's creators appreciate this reality of the Webmaster's work schedule and put as much thought and effort into Dreamweaver's site management and maintenance tools as they put into its development tools. In this lesson, you'll see how to use Dreamweaver's site management tools to define your remote site in order to upload and retrieve files from the Web server. You'll also learn about Dreamweaver's Check-In and Check-Out feature, which lets workgroups develop sites together without overwriting content. And, finally, you'll discover how to attach design notes so that fellow workers can communicate across conflicting work schedules.

Friday - Lesson 12

By now you have an introductory knowledge of Dreamweaver, which means 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 Web site 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 Web site you need to build, you'll know exactly how to plan for its success!

Requirements

Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 (software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins); Windows 7 / Vista / XP; Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger; Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox Web browser, and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader).

Prerequisites: ed2go's Creating Web Pages and Introduction to CSS3 and HTML5, or similar coding experience is recommended prior to taking this course.