Dreamweaver 8 Design and Construction (OReilly Digital Studio)

11.5. Creating New Pages from the Template

Now that you have a template, it's extremely easy to create new pages based on the template. Suppose you want to start filling out the structure of your site by adding home pages for all the top-level content categories: Meet Bill, Coercion, Pandering, and Duplicity. You created folders for these sections of your site in Chapter 7, but these folders remain empty.

Not for much longer! Go to the main menu, and choose File New. The New Document dialog box opens, as before. This time, click the Templates tab at the top of the dialog box, and you get new options, as Figure 11-17 shows.

Select the desired template from the list and then click Create. Dreamweaver opens a new document window and automatically fills it with all the content from the template file, as Figure 11-18 shows.

Assume that you want to save this file as the main page under Meet Bill. In the Title field of the document window, indicate that this is the Meet Bill page. Probably the best way is to attach Meet Bill to the end of the existing title, separating it with a colon (:) or greater-than symbol (>).

Now go back to the main menu, and choose File Save. The Save As dialog box appears. This is the Meet Bill page, so navigate to the subfolder for Meet Bill. Supply a suitable name for the file, such as Figure 11-18. Create a freshly minted page based on your template

Don't stop there! Edit the document window's Title field to match the next top-level category: in this case, Coercion. Choose File Save As from the main menu, and navigate to the Coercion subfolder. Save this file as

Remember, if you get a dialog box asking about updating links, click Yes.