I have to create a website for a college class project using Dreamweaver. I've actually owned the software but never got quite around to using it very often. Anyway, I have some criteria for it but I have no idea where to begin.

Navigation will be simple:
It will just have a homepage (with a menu bar like home, about, contact, etc. only on the homepage though), along with a few "inner-content" pages. I'm thinking it will be organized similar to a blog, but have all links on the homepage, which will also serve as the archive page (no links on the "inner-content" pages).

Style:
It seems like Tables aren't very popular, although they seem easier to use from a designer's point of view. But I'd be willing to give CSS a try.

So, it raises these questions....
1. Do I begin with a "CSS" page or an "HTML" page, then just save it as a template?

2. Is it a good idea to focus on the layout, link positioning, etc. first? Or create all my content pages in html files then modify them with some sort of CSS?

That's it for now, the professors don't care too much about fancy things like "image links", "drop-down menus", etc. ATM.

Do I begin with a "CSS" page or an "HTML" page

Both. A HTML coded page with the style sheet external and linked in.

Do your layout on a single page with enough content to "flesh out" the content areas

I design everything in CSS first, but since you are new to DW it may help to use HTML. I find using HTML pages first means I have to delete a lot of the code to make it CSS compatible, so once you get good at visualizing how CSS tags will look on the page it's best to just go with CSS and then add the tags to the .html page.

OK, I'm having some CSS troubles. I used a DW Template to start with the foundation of the site (One of the examples that came with it, we're suppose to).

After I finished the DWT and CSS properties for the template, I started to create some web pages and just applied the it to the pages (home, about, etc.). The design of the template still looks the same, but for some reason the stylesheet isn't "carrying over".

In the CSS Styles tab, it says the sheet is there (under "All Rules"), but I can't access the subproperties of it in the side menu. It's probably something obvious, but I'm just not catching it. Any Ideas?

EDIT: Nevermind, me being stupid. I had to select "Attach Style Sheet", and then it applied. The strange thing about it though, under the "all rules" tab, it now shows two copies of the stylesheet, one of them has selectable properties (the one I just added), and another one has just the title of it, don't know why.

To be honest using Dreamweaver is a bad idea in my opinion anyway your much better off learning to code sites by hand and being able to understand what all the code means, I find it amazing that a college would ask you to make a site in dreamweaver.

But anyway always get the layout of your site sorted first, make a template file and stick in your content after.

CSS layouts are the proper way of doing website layouts, tables are for displaying tabular data only, this being said a person asking you to use dreamweaver would probley be expecting you to do a layout with tables.

Anybody who takes making websites serious would want to learn how to code pages using HTML and CSS to get started, not use some naf WYSIWYG editor (I know its not your fault so dont take this the wrong way)

Website with tutorials on coding CSS layouts, if your gonna do this make sure you know it inside and out and you really know your coding, cos otherwise they will know all you did was copy and paste the code.

http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/page_layouts/

Now I'm having table problems. How do I "Hide" the table outlines? It's an all white background, so I tried changing the table border color to white, the everything looks fine in DW.

But, when I upload it to the webserver, the table borders are back, like I didn't change the colors at all, why would the browser not read this? How would I change it, etc.?

Originally Posted by johneva

To be honest using Dreamweaver is a bad idea in my opinion anyway your much better off learning to code sites by hand and being able to understand what all the code means, I find it amazing that a college would ask you to make a site in dreamweaver.

I know, but for some reason that's the way they want me to do it, even with tables.

Originally Posted by jamestl2

I know, but for some reason that's the way they want me to do it, even with tables.

Then you have to question the validity of what they are trying to teach you, teaching layout design using tables is like teaching a mechanic to fix everthing with a hammer! I suggest you point them in the direction of http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/ to see how HTML should be usee correctly!

Do you "have" to do the design in tables? I guess you could pull off a decent looking site with tables but it wouldn't be the best use of time. You couldn't stick all layout properties into tables anyway, perhaps just the main ones.

I would have thought setting border="0" would have done it, I suppose you could force a white border in CSS to hide the outlines though. The CSS manager in Dreamweaver has a tab for this, but it's been so long since I switched to manual CSS coding, so I will explain the manual procedure if it helps:

1. Don't enter any properties for the table except padding and spacing if required, and the add class="noborder"

<table width="100%" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="noborder">

2. Open your stylesheet and add:

.noborder { border:1px solid #FFFFFF; }

There's something far simpler. In your CSS:

table{border:none;}

repeat for tr and td. Done.

Actually, all I had to do was change <table border="1"> to "0", since the CSS Properties were at the beginning of the page.

Thanks for giving me that ideas, Tim and Alex.