Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 - Browsing Templates

Learn How to Browse Templates in Macromedia Dreamweaver 8

If you were not blessed with great design talent and you want to create a professional looking website quickly and easily, you are going to love the templates in Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver ships with the broad collection of different kinds of templates. So let me start by just giving you a flavor for what is here. In the page designs folder available from the Start Menu and also from File, New, you will find a lot of different templates. In fact, this is really the most extensive template collection. Everything from texts to pages that have images to different kinds of links, many of these have navigation built into them, a nice variety of templates. The starter pages are new in Dreamweaver 8 and not only do these have text images and everything else, they actually have texts you can use in some of them. And Dreamweaver tries to come with pages almost ready to ship. You need to tailor them a little bit but there are some starter texts to get you going. The page designs folder that has got the CSS after it, these are page or designs that also incorporate cascading styles sheets. So if you know you are going to want to use CSS which I really recommend and you like any of these designs, you can create your pages base on these templates. We will be looking a lot more at cascading styles sheets in later lessons because that really has become the way that most professionals like to develop their websites. If you are going to create website with frames and we will get into that and another lesson too, I strongly recommend that you use these templates. It is so much easier than trying to set up a frame site yourself. And you will find just about any combination of frames you could want. Once you have created a frames template, you can split it, you can drag and drop to make it larger or smaller. We really should be able to get any kind of frame we would want out of those templates. The CSS style sheets folder, these are not really templates, they are styles. When we get into styles, this will make more sense. But these are collections of styles, colors, formatting, fonts, and things like that, that you can apply to elements within a template or any other page you would create in Dreamweaver.