rick stephens
Topics
- Animation
- Batch Processing
- Browser Preview
- Code View
- Color
- Creating Buttons
- CS4 Integration
- CSS
- Custom Swatches
- Dynamic Applications
- Fireworks Optimization
- Forms and Validation
- Graphic Optimization
- Importing Data
- Inserting Menus
- JavaScript
- Lists
- Named Anchors
- Passing Variables
- Photo Galleries
- Photoshop Optimization
- PHP
- Pixel vs Percent Layout
- Rollover Images
- Root Directory
- Site Management
- Slicing
- Spry
- Tables
- Templates
- Workflow
CSS Preferences in DW
My preferences on how dreamweaver works. Below are some of some of the more important ways that I use Dreamweaver to help my workflow for styling web pages.
Creating external style sheets
I really didn't have many discoveries about how Dreamweaver creates external style sheets. I am familiar with creating rules, modifying rules, moving styles from embedded rules to external files and linking pages to external style sheets. All of which can be done easily in Dreamweaver using code view and/or the CSS Styles window.
External Style Sheets are the preferred method to keep style and content separate. This is considered a design best practice. Additionally, this method is the preferred method to maintain a web site. It is much easier to change one style sheet that cascades throughout all pages on the site that are attached to a single style sheet. I duplicated all of my pages from the prior exercises. Then I created a new style sheet which I attached to the new pages. I then styled all the new pages with some "creative" design. The new style sheet is named "weekFour.css".
Creating embedded styles
Embedded Styles are useful to over write some styles that apply to only one page in the site. Embedded styles are higher in the hierarchy than external style sheets so you can use them to overwrite an external style sheet. You want to consider carefully using them, since any future changes will have to be made to every page. I used my Album page to do my embedded and inline styles. This is because that page is styled very differently than the rest of the site. I used all embedded styles for the page.
Creating inline styles
Inline Styles will overwrite either external styles or embedded styles. Therefore these are useful to fine tune a single element on a page. Again, these changes will need to be modified individually if you change them later. I used inline styles in the body of my Album page to set the padding for the page, the table uses inline styling so that I could set different colors for different rows while keeping some rows white. Additionally, I used inline styling to the footer since it doesn't have a style sheet attached.