Subtitles of the Movie

As you've no doubt discovered, Dreamweaver has quite a number of menus and panels, dialogue boxes and complexity in terms of choices so it's a little bit overwhelming but there are a few elements that I want to point out that are very very useful, especially when learning Dreamweaver, the Property Inspector is one which I covered in the previous movie but another kind of hidden dialogue that I think you'll find very very useful is the modify page properties dialogue, this will change a little bit depending on the document you've selected, in this case I'm looking at a CSS style sheet and there's really not much to the page properties but if I move over to a standard HTML document like this one here and choose from the main menu modify and then the first option page properties, that brings up this page properties dialogue, I think this one is well worth learning early on in your Dreamweaver studies so let me take a few moments and talk about some of the options here, now for each page you create in Dreamweaver you can specify layout and formatting properties using this page properties dialogue box. This dialogue box lets you specify the default font family and font size, background color, margin, link styles and many other aspects of your page design. You can assign new page properties for each new page you create or modify those for existing pages, now this is going to be very useful if you have one page that you want to be different from perhaps different pages in your web site, later on we'll talk a lot more about using CSS or cascading style sheets to create a uniform styling across all pages of your document. Now by default, Dreamweaver formats text using CSS, the CSS tags are used for all properties defined in the appearance links and heading categories of this page properties dialogue box. Now the CSS tags that will be created when you set your properties here will be defined as embedded styles in the head section of the document, so that's key that these styles will be unique to this page so again this is going to be useful if you want to create a unique page that's different from all the other pages of your website, perhaps has a different page font, sizes, text colors, and so on. Many of these properties are basic to your work in Dreamweaver so let's review these really quickly this is also a really good introduction to what we'll be doing later with cascading style sheets, some of the properties you can modify there are the same as these s you've got obviously sizes of text, text colors, the repeat is you can actually tile these elements in an x,y,n direction more on that later, margins are very important, I usually in previous versions of Dreamweaver I made it a routine process to go in and add zeros here in these left margin, right margin, top margin, bottom margin settings, notice now in Dreamweaver CS4 these are added for you. Under the appearance category you've got background images and background colors, margin and margin widths, linking colors, notice that the default link color in most browsers is this blue and then a purple color for visited links but you can change that to any color that you want. Headings, heading 1, heading 2, heading 3, those are HTML properties, title encoding, obviously the title of the document is very very important, that's also included here in the very front of the Dreamweaver interface, that's such an important property the document title that they included in both places right there so I definitely require all my Dreamweaver students to include a page title in all of their pages, this is important, that's the title that will appear in the browser and it's also the title that will appear in a search engine when people are searching for your page so very very important. And then you've also got a tracing image options here, more on this tracing image a little bit later in the tutorial, in the creating and laying out pages section you can actually trace over tables putting the trace image there from Photoshop and then trace over with tables or DIV tags to create a mock up of the page layout that you created in Photoshop or perhaps Fireworks. So there you have a quick overview of this very useful page properties dialogue, let's now move on to the next section of this tutorial, creating and laying out pages where you will learn how to lay out pages by drawing AP DIVs, how to lay out pages with tables, how to use the tracing feature to trace tables over layout images as well as tracing AP DIVs over layout images and much much more.