Introduction

Welcome to Dreamweaver CS3 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide! Adobe Dreamweaver has long (under its previous name, Macromedia Dreamweaver) been the premier visual tool for Web site developers, allowing you to build great-looking Web pages and smoothly running Web sites. Dreamweaver’s ease-of-use takes much of the pain out of creating Web sites, without sacrificing flexibility. It’s possible to use Dreamweaver to create terrific Web sites without knowing much about HTML, CSS and JavaScript (though you will create better Web sites if you familiarize yourself with at least the basics of these languages).

Dreamweaver is a rich, powerful, and deep program, and at first glance, it can be a bit intimidating. We’ve written this book as a painless introduction to Dreamweaver and its features, and with our help, you will use Dreamweaver to build an excellent Web site.

Using this book

We’ve organized the different elements of building Web sites with Dreamweaver CS3 into chapters, and within each chapter are numbered, step-by-step directions that tell you exactly how to accomplish various tasks. You don’t have to work through the entire book in order, but it is structured so the more complex material builds on the earlier tasks.

We start with an overview of Dreamweaver, move on to setting up your Web site and creating your first Web page, then discuss how to add content and interactivity to your pages. Finally, we show you how to work with HTML code and manage your Web site.

When we decided to write this book, we wanted to take a fresh look at Dreamweaver—at how people use it, and how people should use it. Throughout the book, we’ve tried to show you how to use Dreamweaver using its most modern features, rather than using some of the features that are still in the program, but are “old school.” Specifically, we’ll show you how to apply styles and position your page elements using Cascading Style Sheets, rather than older, obsolete methods. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry; it’s all explained in Chapters 5 through 7.

For keyboard commands, we’ve included Mac keyboard shortcuts in parentheses immediately after the Windows shortcut, like this:

To open the Find & Replace dialog, press Ctrl-F (Cmd-F).

While writing this book, we’ve made the assumption that you’re familiar with the basics of using Windows or Mac OS X. You don’t need to be a computer expert by any means, but you shouldn’t be stumped by concepts like selecting text, using menus, clicking and dragging, and using files and folders. Naturally, you should be familiar with Web surfing and how to use a Web browser to view a Web site.

Getting the most from Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is a professional-class tool, and it provides professional results. Dreamweaver allows you to build Web sites visually, without needing to know the details of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But to best use Dreamweaver, you will still need some fundamental knowledge of what these languages are, and how they work together to make up a Web site. Similarly, you will find it helpful to know such basic things such as what a Web page is and what a Web server does.

Where necessary, in this book we explain what you’ll need to know about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to work with Dreamweaver. But there is much more to say about these subjects, and there are thousands of books devoted to that job. In fact, we wrote one of the most popular books on JavaScript. You’ll find information about that book, as well as some of our favorite Web design and development books written by other authors, listed in Appendix A.

A note for our Mac-using friends

If you’ve flipped through this book already, you probably noticed that the vast majority of the screenshots were taken on machines running Windows (both Windows XP and Windows Vista). That doesn’t mean that the book (or its authors) don’t welcome Dreamweaver users on the Mac. Far from it; in fact, both of us are primarily Mac users, and we are frequent contributors to Macworld magazine and other Mac-oriented publications.

However, our crack research department tells us that most Dreamweaver users are running the program on Windows machines, so we have included screenshots that will reflect the experience of the majority of our readers. Happily, Dreamweaver (and especially Dreamweaver CS3) works almost identically on both platforms. In the few cases where there are differences, we’ve included separate procedures for Windows and for Mac users.

There is one other thing that we haven’t done in this book that we have done in our previous Mac books. We are no longer telling Mac users to Control-click to bring up a contextual menu (which we sometimes call shortcut menus in this book). Instead, we’ve adopted right-click, because Apple is now shipping its multiple-button mouse (which it calls Mighty Mouse) with all of its computers that come with a mouse. If you still have one of the old Apple mice with a single button, just mentally substitute Control-click wherever you see right-click in the book. Better yet, we suggest that you get any USB or wireless mouse with multiple buttons and a scroll wheel. It will really increase your productivity.

There’s more online

We’ve prepared a companion Web site for this book, which you’ll find at:

http://www.dreamweaverbook.com

On this site, you’ll find news about the book and links to other online resources that will help you use Dreamweaver CS3 more productively. If we discover any mistakes in the book that somehow got through the editing process, we’ll list the updates on the site, too.

If you have any questions, please first check the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page on the companion Web site. It’s clearly marked. If you’ve read the FAQ, and your question isn’t answered there, you can contact us via email at [email protected]. We regret that because of the large volume of email that we get, we cannot, and will not, answer email about the book sent to our personal email addresses. We can only guarantee that messages sent to the [email protected] email address will be answered. Unfortunately, due to the danger of computer viruses being spread with e-mail attachments, we cannot accept any messages with attachments.

Let’s get started

Every journey begins with a first step, and if you’ve read this far, your journey with Dreamweaver has already begun. Thanks for joining us, and let’s get started building your great Web site.

—Tom Negrino and Dori Smith

May 2007