Creating a Web Page in Dreamweaver 8: Visual QuickProject Guide

The page's file name and title serve different purposes. The file name is used behind the scenes to help you and Dreamweaver keep track of how your files are organized. For example, home pages should always be named index, which helps Web servers know that this page is the "front door" to your site. The page title is what the viewer's Web browser displays when your page is onscreen.

The Basic Page column offers lots of choices, including templates and library items. Both are explained in later chapters (see pages 91 and 96). Working with non-HTML pages, such as those using CSS and XML, is covered in the Macromedia Dreamweaver 8: Visual QuickStart Guide.

Catching up with the default view in previous Windows versions, Mac users now can display all their Dreamweaver 8 pages (even single pages) as tabs in the main window. Choose Edit > Preferences > General (Windows) or Dreamweaver > Preferences > General (Mac) and in Document options check Always show tabs.

Macintosh computers display Web page text at about three-fourths the size that it appears on a Windows machine, so if you are building your Web site on a Windows PC, avoid the smallest text sizes. On the other hand, if you're creating pages with a Mac, leave enough space at the bottom of text columns to handle the text running about 25 percent longer when viewed on a Windows machine.

When you first choose a special character, a dialog box warns that it may not be available for non-Western alphabets. Click OK to continue.

To see all 99 special characters that are available, choose Insert > HTML > Special Characters > Other.

To reach the special characters more easily, switch the Insert bar from Common to Text, then click the far-right button and choose from the drop-down menu.

To keep your pages uncluttered, limit yourself to no more than two or three heading sizes on the same page.

While you can choose Edit Font List in the Font drop-down menu and pick a particular font installed on your own computer, there's no guarantee visitors will have the font, so stick to the six most common font groups.

For now, we're creating CSS rules for this page only. But as you'll see in Chapter 5, we can use them to quickly create rules for an entire Web site.