Help building a dreamweaver website
I’ve been developing a website for The Hound Welfare Fund. They are a charity that looks after foxhounds after their hunting days are over and they enter retirement. While I have designed a number of commercial websites, I have to admit that I am not an avid developer. I am very very picky about the the colours, layouts, buttons, separators and every niggling detail of the site for which I am responsible. While I am more than happy to give direction, feedback and the odd encouragement to a developer who is coding the site, I don’t much enjoy being my own developer because I am such a pain in the ass to work for. It can get quite tedious.
On this occasion I was asked to develop the site in Dreamweaver CS4. I’ve become pretty proficient at the now outdated Microsoft Frontpage and I’ve found Kompozer pretty reasonable to work with but this is my first development in Dreamweaver. I don’t have much to say about Dreamweaver other than that the closest thing I can think of to switching to Dreamweaver from other packages is when I switched to an HP calculator from TI. For the uninitiatied, most HP calculators work in a system called RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) so if you are adding 2 and 3 together you enter “2″, then “3″ then “+”. It takes some getting used to. So does Dreamweaver.
Anyway, if you are starting your first project in Dreamweaver, I can recommend a site called TheSiteWizard.com that has a great Dreamweaver tutorial to get you started on your first site. I think the author, Christopher Heng, does a great job of stepping you through the initial development and getting you used to the (rather strange) controls in Dreamweaver CS4. Be sure to donate to his site too if you find it useful.
