To date i have been making simple edits and changes to some of the coding to add mods, or ads, or what have you...

What id like to start doing is working on pages on my site that have the header/footer and use a body file. I was able to do this in wordpad.

What id like to do is be able to visually design these pages in Dreamweaver, but im tryin to define the forum directory (i have locally) as a dreamweaver site...it does this but nothing shows in design view, and it highlights most of the code red and stuff.

Is there something i have to do special to work with designing new pages for the forum visually, or is it not possible to load this stuff into dreamweaver?
thanks.

You can load whatever you like into Dreamweaver, as HTML and all that jive is nothing but text-files. Whether you should then to begin editing them in WYSIWYG mode, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether.

If you learn a little bit more about the underlying code, it will make any task such as this much more pleasant.