Dreamweaver Quick Sheet
In Dreamweaver it is often helpful to use the floating palettes as a way to keep track of your work. If the floating palettes do not appear when you open your document, click “Window” on the toolbar, and scroll to “show floating palettes.” There are three different “floating” palette”: Properties inspector, objects palette, and launcher palette. One of the most useful is the properties inspector. If the properties inspector does not appear when you open the document, click “Window” on the toolbar, and scroll to “properties.”
Properties Inspector
Objects Palette
Page properties
“Page Properties” allows you to change aspects of the page including background color or image, links color, text color, and page title, from the same dialogue box. To access “Page Properties”, click on “Modify” on the toolbar, then scroll to “Page Properties.”
Page dimensions
A safe graphic area for your webpage is 640 x 480. Webpages that exceed the width dimension may cause users to scroll to view the entire page. You want the entire width of your page to appear when the user types in the URL.
You can adjust the dimensions of your webpage using the “window size” button on the bottom right-hand side of the Dreamweaver interface (just to the right of the mini-launcher).
Graphics on the web
There are two file formats for saving images to display on the web: .gif and .jpeg. Certain formats are more appropriate for certain types of images. This information can be found in more detail in chapter 8 of Lynch and Horton’s Web Style Guide, and Williams and Tollett’s The Non-Designer’s Web Book.
GIFs / JPEGsBest for images with large areas of solid color (simple illustrations, logo, text as graphics) / Best for photographs and medical illustrations
Allows the background color of a page show through part of image (image appears to float on page rather than in a box) / No transparent areas
Allows graphics to be interlaced (web graphics that appear in layers, adding clarity with each layer). Interlacing allows a web users to scroll up and down page while waiting for graphic to load. / No interlacing—you have to wait for the entire image to load onthe page in full resolution, HOWEVER, the high compression ration for JPEGs means that the image will download faster.
Allows anti-aliased objects to decreased jagged edges in images. HOWEVER, if you plan to make part of an image transparent, don’t use anti-aliased because the anti-aliased pixels will correspond to the original background color.
Limited to a max of 256 colors / Can contain up to 16.7 million colors (24-bit or true color images). This is important if you need to show subtleties among colors.
Simmons | Dreamweaver quick sheet 1