Getting Started With Dreamweaver MX

Design Notes

Design Notes are useful during the production of a web site, as they allow you to make essential notes about design ideas and tips about a particular file directly within Dreamweaver. If you like, Design Notes are Dreamweaver's version of a PostIt note, and are accessible (optionally) to whomever you share web development tasks with.

By default Design Notes are maintained, but you can turn this feature off, though this isn't really recommended, as Design Notes are used to store more than just your information about a file. They also store internal system values, such as recordset information, and can be shared amongst development teams by enabling the Design Notes-sharing option.

You can purge all design notes from a site at any time by clicking the "Clean Up..." button.

Site Map Layout

One of Dreamweaver's most useful features is its ability to diagrammatically show you the structure of your web site. This allows you to view the relationship between various pages easily, as well as see at a glance any broken or orphaned links within your site.

All site maps are generated in relation to a specified homepage, so if you wish to take advantage of Site Mapping features, then you should specify the very first page of your site here.

Number of Columns and Column Width allow you to control the size of the generated site map, while the Icon Labels options allow you to determine which icons in the site map have descriptive text next to them.

Display Files Marked as Hidden ensures that all files (hidden or otherwise) are shown within your site map, so that you can properly see their relationship to other files in your site, whilst Display Dependent Files, displays a list of every file referred to in each page.