OK, I have created a website but was using the same html layout for every single page on the site, which meant that if I wanted to change the navigation bar I would have to amend every single page.

Anyway, I have decided to create a template so that any changes I make to certain parts if the website (navigation bar especially) can be done on a master template and the changes will be automatically applied to the rest.

Question is: how do I do this in dreamweaver. I want the Nav bar at the side to be part of the template, and also the title bar at the top of the site (ie.repeating content), but everything else in the main frame (ie.unique content) should be unique to each page. Check out the site: DOGBOX RECORDS - ENTER

Although I have checked out the tutorials I can only create a text box for the unique content.

Can anyone point me in the right direction of a tutorial that explains how to do this?

Cheers in advance for help.

Open the document and save it as a template - File/Open - File/Save As/Template (name the file as something like main.dwt). You'll get a warning that the template contains no editible regions - click OK.

Next you need to define your editible regions: In your document it looks like you probably have two tables in the middle that you want to be able to edit:

First select the table at row 139 then click Insert/Template Objects/Editible Region. Repeat with the table at row 188 and you'll now have the two tables in the middle of the document that can be edited to show different content for each page. File/Save/ then close the document (I suggest putting the template into a unique folder named Templates.)

Now comes the tricky part. If you apply the template to an existing web page it will overwrite everything on the existing page (meaning you'll lose all the text that you have so carefully written for kennel.htm when you apply the template to that document.... I open all my pages and then do a 'save as' renaming them to kennel1.htm and talk1.htm, etc. etc until I have a complete copy of the pages.

Close all the pages you have open.

Open kennel.htm - click on the assets tab under files in the right column - select your new main.dwt template then click the apply button at the bottom of the assets column. The template has now been applied to kennel.htm (however all your text is now hosed). Now open kennel1.htm - copy the text from the table in row 139 and paste it over the text in the table at row 139 in kennel.htm - repeat with the text in the table at row 188.

When you have applied the template to each page (and tested the pages on the server to be sure that everything looks and works as you expect) then you can erase all the extra pages like kennel1.htm....

Naturally you understand that this is a backward way to apply a template - - The easy way is to select a page with a template already applied (on an existing website) - open the page, do a save as 'anynewname.htm' then erase the text from the old page and write over it with the new text from the page you are developing. That way you'll be starting with a templated page.

You'll find that tempates are a wonderful invention - I have a number of large websites (some with more than 500 pages) that are templated with only four or five different templates - - makes changing navigation bars a snap.

Would it not be easier to put your menu in as a server-side include ??

Cheers for the advice. I will test out your advice very soon. The only thing that really concerns me is that my website is centred, and that I like to convert from tables to frames, and then back again, quite a lot.

Thanks

You'd be a lot better off is you didn't use tables or frames