Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Taking Advantage Of Adobe Dreamweaver's Visual Development Environment

By Tina Brown


Adobe Dreamweaver is aimed at inexperienced and experienced developers alike and is a multi-purpose web development tool. It uses standards-compliant web technologies such as XHTML and CSS. Web content can be imported into the Dreamweaver at any time without the danger of the program modifying your code. In the same way, pages created in Dreamweaver can be taken out of the Dreamweaver environment and used elsewhere. The program does not rely on its own unique solutions which will only work in the Dreamweaver environment.

Although Dreamweaver is not necessarily the best environment for creating all types of website, it is not an environment which one easily outgrows. It can be used both for creating basic, static content consisting of client side pages as well as more sophisticated dynamic content including server-side pages. In other words, it is suitable for developing the content found on the vast majority of websites.

Traditionally, there were basically two types of software tool which could be used to create web pages. The first type allowed you to edit the code which produces each of your pages. The second type offered you a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface in which you could work with the text, images and other objects as they will appear on your pages. As you do so, the program automatically generates the necessary code.

Originally Dreamweaver was placed in the second category. However, the fact that it soon developed excellent features for site management, code editing and collaboration meant that it soon belonged to both categories. This may help to explain why it has become such an industry standard tool for website development.

Dreamweaver contains all the tools you will need to create, manage and update a web site. Web sites can either be created from scratch or, if they already exist, pages, subdirectories and images can be imported and converted into a Dreamweaver site. Even if you have no knowledge of the underlying web technologies, Dreamweaver allows you to become productive in the web site creation process.

Beyond the basics, Dreamweaver boasts an impressive array of, easy-to-use commands for adding interactivity to your web pages. Dynamic effects like rollovers, pop-up windows and the showing and hiding of page content can be achieved without any programming. Dreamweaver automatically generates the necessary JavaScript for you. Similarly, Adobe's Spry technology, based on CSS and JavaScript, provides easy access to complex, interactive functionality. Using Spry, you can easily create interactive, drop-down menus, advanced layout elements like tabbed panels and add sophisticated form validation to prevent visitors to your site from submitting forms inappropriate data.

Dreamweaver also allows the inclusion of dynamic content into your web sites. It has powerful code-generation facilities for connecting to databases and database servers, for creating search and results pages and for setting up user authentication.

Dreamweaver also includes sophisticated site management tools. Unless you are mainly concerned with creating email newsletters and similar promotional material, your web development will consist of building and editing pages that work together to form part of a web site. You may also need to work on several such sites simultaneously.

In terms of site management and optimization, Dreamweaver's offers powerful tools for maintaining consistency across your pages and for modifying and updating elements across the entire site. As your site progresses, the program allows you to preview and test your pages, to synchronise local and live versions of a site, to check links and browser compatibility and, naturally, it incorporates FTP client software.




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