When you first launched Dreamweaver, you are greeted by the Start Menu which makes it easier to create a wide variety of page, designs, and formats. You can click the Do Not Show Again button if you prefer not to see this window. But I would hold off on that until you have been using Dreamweaver for a while because a lot of people find this screen handy. You will see on the left part of this opening screen that you have Open a Recent Item as a list of options. That is all the files and folders that I have opened most recently and it just gives me a short cut back to those pages. In the middle, you see Create New that makes it easy to create files in a variety of formats. Html being the most common one but Coldfusion, PHP and ASP, those are all web formats that you will learn about during this lesson.
In the third column, you see Create from Samples. These are Dreamweaver’s templates and starter pages. We will get into those later in this series as well. And those are all shortcuts to creating websites. I am going to start by opening a page from an existing website just so we have something on the screen as we tour the interface. All of the files for these lessons are in the project files that came with your DVD. Part I Lesson 1 in the digital family website and I am just going to open the main page which is called index.html. This website and all of the other examples I used in these lessons are on your DVD but you do not need to use any of these files for this first part. This is the tour part of your training. So sit back, relax, and just let me show you around for a few minutes.
The main area of the workspace is called the Document Window. This is where you work on new and existing pages. If you use the designer interface and you are in design view, you should see your page as it will look in a web browser much like you see here. If you want to see the html code behind your page, click the code button in the top left. That is html code. Actually, that is more than html code because this particular page has rollovers and some other fancy features. But this is to give you an idea of what is behind on actual web page here. And, Dreamweaver is really well designed for switching back and forth between Design Mode and Code Mode or one of my favorite features, Slit.
This is cool because it lets you see the design feature as well as the code at the same time. And check this out. If you click on something like an image in the Design View, it immediately is highlighted in the Code View. So you can quickly find your place in a messy page of code like this. I am going to stick with Design View because that is by far my preference and most web designers that I work with really do prefer to stay here. But, we will get into the Code View later in the lessons and that is a good thing to know how to do once in a while. If you have a problem in the Dreamweaver interface or something is not working right, sometimes going in trying to troubleshoot it in the code is faster than trying to fix it in Design View.
