Building Web Sites All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Getting Started With Dreamweaver

In This Chapter

• Touring the Dreamweaver interface

• Creating a Web site

• Creating pages and supporting files in Dreamweaver

• Testing your pages and validating the code

• Publishing your Web site

Dreamweaver 8, the industry standard software for Web design, has some great features and some very useful tools to help designers and developers to be more efficient. Some of the features include code formatting, comment features to help keep code understandable, and code collapsing to help you focus on an area of your code. The handy placement and functionality these features add are great assets as you start to work with your first Web pages and HTML code. This chapter gives you a quick‐and‐dirty tour of Dreamweaver before delving into using this very handy tool.

Before you start working in Dreamweaver, it is a good idea to make sure you have Web hosting and a URL purchased. You can actually work on your site before you do these things, but that's not a great idea because you must be sure you can find and afford hosting that will accommodate your site (not all hosts are the same). The URL is important, especially if the name of the site will be the URL. Designing a site only to discover later that someone else already owns the name is a real drag. This scenario has happened more often than you'd think — don't let it happen to you. Book I has information about choosing hosts and URLs.

Exploring the Dreamweaver Interface

Before you dive right into Dreamweaver ...