Introduction

Welcome to Dreamweaver CC: Visual QuickStart Guide! Adobe Dreamweaver has long (initially under its previous name, Macromedia Dreamweaver) been the premier visual tool for website developers, allowing you to build great-looking webpages and smoothly running websites. Dreamweaver’s ease-of-use takes much of the pain out of creating websites, without sacrificing flexibility. It’s possible to use Dreamweaver to create terrific websites without knowing much about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

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 website.

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

When we first 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 that are “old school.” Specifically, we’ll show you how to apply styles and lay out 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 7 through 9.

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 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 website.

Where necessary, throughout 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, in Appendix A.

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 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 context menu (also known as a shortcut or contextual menu). Instead, we’ve adopted right-click, because Apple ships its multiple-button mouse with all of its computers that come with a mouse. If you are using a Mac with a trackpad, 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.

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 CC 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 about the book’s contents, please first check the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page on the companion website. 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 or via the contact forms on our personal sites. We can promise that messages sent only to the [email protected] email address will be read and answered, as time allows. Unfortunately, due to the danger of computer viruses being spread with email attachments, we cannot accept any messages with attachments. We also must limit ourselves to responding to questions about the book; time doesn’t permit us to answer general questions about web design and development.

—Tom Negrino and Dori Smith, July 2013