QuickStart! - Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Tutorials
Creating Documents / Putting Content In Tables pt. 1
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Subtitles of the Movie (QuickStart! - Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 / Creating Documents / Putting Content In Tables pt. 1)
Now that you've defined a site and got your folder and file management under control, you're now ready to create a document. That will take you to the welcome screen here in Dreamweaver. Let's start off by creating an HTML document, so click on that option. That will bring up a blank document. Now, you may be tempted to start typing and adding content directly to your document, but I recommend instead placing all of your site content in either a table or a layer. In this movie, let me focus on using tables to add and format your content, and in the following movie, I'll show you how to use layers. Tables have the advantage of once you establish your tables and get your layout the way you want it, they tend to be more stable and they'll be more consistent across browsers and operating systems, but they're not very flexible and it's hard to get your designs and your layouts the way you want them. Layers are much easier to move around and get just the way you want them to look here in Dreamweaver, but they tend to float around and change quite a bit more than tables in the various browsers. So to create a table, you can either use the insert menu here, inserting a table. That will bring up the insert table dialog here. You can also insert a table using the insert menu. Up here at the top, there's an icon for a table. Clicking on that icon will give you this very same dialog. Here you can set up the number of rows and columns you want. Let's go with a standard 3 x 3, three row by three column table. I can set my table with either pixels or percent. Percent will mean that the table will adjust itself to a percentage of the browser window, so 100% will fill the browser window up. 50% will always only fill half the browser up. I definitely recommend, to start with, that you go with a pixel, a fixed pixel width on your tables. These are more predictable and you're more likely to control the legibility of your text, in particular. If you text is too wide, it is less legible. If you set your table to percentage, you don't really have any control over how wide your tables get. I also recommend removing the borders, so put a border thickness of 0 pixels. Cell padding and cell spacing will add some spaces between the cells. I'm going to leave those empty for now, take everything else as default and click okay. Notice that you'll see an outline of your table. You will not see this outline in the browser. These lines here are just to remind you of where the various table cells are. Remember that cells are the intersection of a row with a column and you click your cursor inside of that cell and then type in the text content that you want, or you can insert an image into that individual cell. You can also adjust the widths and the heights of the various cells by moving your cursor to the edge of the cell until you get a double-headed arrow like this and you can adjust it. However, Dreamweaver tends to trick you with these layouts of tables in that these table cells will compress and contract, depending on what's adjacent to that cell, what's above it and below it, so it takes a little bit of practice to get used to understanding the way that the table will be represented here in Dreamweaver and how it will look in the browser when you're done. So I encourage you to very frequently check this table layout in a browser by choosing file, preview in browser, and then choose your favorite browser here that you want to preview your table in.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | QuickStart! - Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 |
| Author: | James Gonzalez |
| SKU: | 33771 |
| ISBN: | |
| Release Date: | 2007-06-29 |
| Duration: | 1.5 hrs / 19 lessons |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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