Introduction to Dreamweaver CS6

About This Course

You've taken your first steps into Web design, and your fingers are beginning to cramp from all that typing—but don't panic! Developing your coding skills has not been in vain! You're ready for Dreamweaver—Adobe's preeminent Web development application—which has been designed from the ground up to make developing websites easier.

You'll begin by touring the Dreamweaver workspace and configuring it for your specific site-management needs. You'll learn how to use Dreamweaver's intuitive tool set to structure text, and investigate the myriad formatting options CSS provides. Along the way, you'll work with images, build navigation elements, discuss effective layout methods, learn where and when to use tables, and examine successful site planning strategies.

By the end of the course, you'll have successfully built a website and know how to use Dreamweaver's built-in FTP tools to upload to the server of your choice. 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

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.

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 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.

Friday - Lesson 04

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.

Week 3

Wednesday - Lesson 05

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.

Friday - Lesson 06

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.

Week 4

Wednesday - Lesson 07

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.

Friday - Lesson 08

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.

Week 5

Wednesday - Lesson 09

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.

Friday - Lesson 10

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.

Week 6

Wednesday - Lesson 11

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.

Friday - Lesson 12

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!

Requirements

Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 for Windows or Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 for Mac (Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.)

Windows Requirements: Intel® Pentium® 4 or AMD Athlon® 64 processor, Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 2 (Service Pack 3 recommended); Windows Vista® Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise with Service Pack 1; or Windows 7, at least 512MB of RAM, at least 1GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation, 1280x800 display with 16-bit video card, Java Runtime Environment 1.6 (included) and DVD-ROM drive.

Macintosh Requirements: Multicore Intel processor, Mac OS X v10.6.8 or v10.7, at least 512MB of RAM, at least 1.8GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation, 1280x800 display with 16-bit video card, Java Runtime Environment 1.6 and DVD-ROM drive.

Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer or 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.