Free! - Web Design With Dreamweaver 8 - Reviews - Articles

From The Friends Of Ed Site

Dreamweaver is Macromedia’s best-selling web design/development environment, and the updated version of Dreamweaver will be available later this year. Dreamweaver has the capability to generate dynamic website code using server-side languages like ASP, PHP, and ASP.NET. We know that you don't always require a full database driven site though, so this book focuses on using the latest version of Dreamweaver to design and create usable, standards-compliant websites using XHTML and CSS. One of the highlights of this version is much closer, tighter CSS/XHTML. This book will show you how to make the most of that feature.

Overview

After a brief introduction to the latest version of Dreamweaver, and how CSS and XHTML fit into it, Craig looks at using the software for your web design projects in a hands-on, task based manner, covering these topics:

Setting up a site in Dreamweaver
Global web site essentials, such as dealing with doctypes, meta tags, comments, and page defaults, and attaching CSS and JavaScript files to your page
Styling page content properly using CSS
Working with images
Creating web site navigation
CSS for impressive page layouts that work
Getting user feedback via forms

Following these exercises, the book then shows how to bring everything together with a final case study using Dreamweaver to build a complete web site.

Summary of Contents:

Chapter 1: A New Kind of Web Design
Chapter 2: Getting Started with Dreamweaver
Chapter 3: Setting Up a Website
Chapter 4: Web Page Essentials
Chapter 5: Working with Text
Chapter 6: Working with Images
Chapter 7: Creating Navigation for Your Website
Chapter 8: Web Page Layouts
Chapter 9: Getting User Feedback
Chapter 10: Putting It All into Practice

Who is this book for?

Have you never setup a site in Dreamweaver in the proper way, do you feel you don't get the most out of Dreamweaver or are you completely new to Dreamweaver 8? Then this book is for you. This book is excellent for beginners but it will contain useful tips for intermediate users as well.

Conclusion

This book makes sure you start with a good basis. We get a lot of questions on DMXzone.com that book can answer. The book has got a clear layout. One of the few things that could be improved design wise is the fact that the same graphic is used for each chapter but other then that the screenshots are clear and the graphics are functional. The author teaches beginners to get the most out of Dreamweaver, so if you are relatively new to Dreamweaver you should really get this book.

Competition

The friendly people of Friends of ED are giving away 5 books. All you need to do, to enter the competition is; download the extract (press read more and then download sample PDF on your right) and answer the following question:

What is an image map? Please use the exact description of the sample PDF for your answer.

Send your answer to this e-mail address, before Thursday the 6th of April 2006. Don't forget to include your post address and phone number (required for international shipping) in the e-mail.

Good Luck!