i am a newbie and was told and read many times not to use dreamweaver. i was wondering what tools as a newbie htmler and csser i should use? and how would i position elements exactly on the page if i cant see it or draw it in the Dreamweaver design view mode. any help greatly appreciated. after struggling with dreamweavers garbage as a newbie it is only holding me back but now i dont know how to start without being able to draw in those layout cells and tables, acccurately shaping and placing them to fit my image slices and elements on the page. any help GREATLY appreciated because this is the best/worst position i have been in in months of working on it. thanks. derek

You don't need to quit using Dreamweaver because it's a decent editor, but if you want to move to the next level, you should begin learning the actual code itself. That means transitioning from the design view to the code view in Dreamweaver. In order to do that, you'll have to learn HTML and CSS.

The design view in Dreamweaver isn't necessarily an accurate picture of what you'll get in the actual browsers. You need to test your design in the browsers themselves to see what they really look like as the design view only offers an approximation. Browsers worth testing are Internet Explorer 6, 7, (and 8 when it gets out of beta), Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome. I recommend developing for Firefox first because it is a standards compliant browser. If it looks good in Firefox, it will generally display the same in Opera, Safari, and Chrome. Once it looks good in those browsers, you may need to apply some further code to get the design looking good in Internet Explorer. IE6 is particularly troublesome.

The best places to learn HTML and CSS are:

• http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/
• http://www.w3schools.com/
• http://www.tizag.com/
• http://www.alistapart.com/topics/code

thank you very much. i will use code view. im learning on w3schools right now also. going back to basic html. also, i was wondering in code view when coding, how do you accurately place divs and other containers on the page without being able to drag and draw them around in design view? i have had problems with design view doing what i want. like when i put i div wrapper around a table. DW wont let me add another div inside the table. i dont know why. but mainly, i was wondering how you place elements accurately on the page (like a div for an image slice) without drawing the div in design view. any help appreciated thanks for your post. derek

You position them with CSS. In code view, Dreamweaver doesn't prevent you from doing anything as it's all typing, so you could put a div within a table. However, as you progress, you'll find that you won't want to use tables for layout at all as it can actually be easier to use divs because you use fewer of them and handle all of the positioning with CSS. You're on the right track, I think. What I recommend is to Google "tableless CSS tutorials" and learning through a series of tutorials. It's always easier when you have something hands on.

thank you very much for helping. derek