Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 - The Status Bar

Learn How to Use the Status Bar in Macromedia Dreamweaver 8

At the bottom of any window or at the bottom of your document, you will find what is called the Status Bar. The Status Bar is really cool because it offers not only shortcuts to different features of your page, it also gives you access to some handy tools and has some information about your page. Let us start over here for a second. If you click on the body tag, you are going to get everything on your page selected. But if you want to just select a particular table for example, clicking on that tag will select just that or you can select image and just highlight and select a particular image. Depending on where you click on the page, all of the related html tags appear here and you can click to select them. At the right side of the Status Bar, you will find an arrow, a selection tool, kind of like you would see in Photoshop. The hand, again, if you are used to an image editor, you will like that that moves things around and this new Zoom In feature that lets you Zoom In closer and move out further away. You can also use this to get back to a 100% or whatever percentage that you want to work in. This option tells you the size of the window that you are working in. And finally here on the right, you have an option which shows you how heavy your pages meaning how many information and how long that will take to load on the screen. If you click this little arrow to edit sizes, you will actually get to a place where you can change your preferences about this. So you can change the connection speed that is used in determining how fast that page loads. I think 56 is actually a pretty safe setting because it keeps you honest knowing that anybody who is still on a dial up connection probably at least has a 56K Modem. And, you can see how long it will take on that or if you know that you got a high bandwidth audience, most of the people coming in or broadband users, you may want to go up to a higher setting so that you can see how many seconds it will take them. And then just click okay to close this panel.