installed dreamweaver cs3, now what?

i don't even know why i have this dreamweaver installed on my computer, but i see a lot of people like and talk about it. i have no idea where to begin, total newbie. where and how should i start?

 

Depending on your knowledge of coding standard...Try making you own layout using Photoshop in conjunction with Dreamweaver.

Try W3Schools [you will have to google them] and start by going over the basics in HTML and CSS

Kind Regards,
Nick
CEO Xeter Design and Development

 

A good place to start is tutorial pages.

Doing these tutorials gives you practice, and when you're practicing, you're learning .

Try typing "dreamweaver tutorials" in google and get started .

 

Thank you, i found a lot of them. i am looking for video tutorials because the text tutorials are very hard to follow through requiring too much reading.

 

Once you start getting good at the Dreamweaver tutorials and WYSIWYG, "What You See Is What You Get" (graphical design), start looking up HTML tutorials. You will actually be able to program your own sites. From there I would suggest learning CSS.

 

Look here for some good tuts

http://www.netmag.co.uk/zine/develop

It's the website of an Industry magazine, but they have some novice stuff on their site, they know their stuff too.

 

If you are a newbie, then you must have a tutorial of some sort. The bets way to learn is a video tutorial. Unless, you want to build a site with really cool features, I just recommend you to use Wordpress or Drupal.

 

try some at video-tutes.com
its a very nice site.

 

first of all get some hand on with HTML .....so try w3school tutoials....if you have basic knowledge of HTML then try to work with Dreamweaver...it is a very good software for designing webpages.....you can try training material of www.Lynad.com they provide some very good videos on webdesign through dreamweaver

 

First go to html tutorial sites, there are a lot of free tutorials that you can find on the net

 

First, put Dreamweaver away for a bit -- don't even launch it. Spend a couple of weeks going through the tutorials on html and css. Then go back to Dreamweaver, and it will all fall into place.

 

You mean http://lynda.com,

yep hes right.

 

Uninstall it.

lol nah not really. Depends if you want to use it's designer interface or it's coding interface. I'd recomend the latter, but it's up to you.

Just look up tutorials on whichever you want.

 

Best advice here. Everyone talks about it because it does their work for them. It's a car that tries to drive itself-- and it doesn't drive as good as a human being.

I would strongly advise against using it if you want to know how to build web pages. I suppose it's fine if you're only making your own personal MySpace or whatever.

 

I think DW is misunderstood by most people. It's not just a HTML editor, thats probably the least important function.

If anyone else has worked through the Lynda.com courses and learned about some of the more advanced features, they'd see its worth.

@stomme why would you advise against using it? It only does what you tell it to.

 

The reason many people dislike Dreamweaver is because way too many people use the WYSIWYG as a crutch to output crappy code. Yes, DW does have a lot of other features, like managing sites, FTP, automatically closing tags in code-view and many more. However, a majority of people we see here on DP never use those features. This is the process that most Dreamweaver users follow to create a page:

1-Create design in photoshop. (Or if they are particularly lazy, use a template).
2-Slice it up in ImageReady.
3-Use the WYSIWYG to compile several pages.
4-Post on Digital Point asking why their pages doesn't look right in web browsers.

If you are going to learn how to make web pages, learn the proper way right from the beginning. Using a WYSIWYG only hinders your learning.

My recommendations to the starter of this thread.

1-If you want to use DW, DON'T use the WYSIWYG.
2-Only use the coding view.
3-Download some valid CSS templates, and STUDY the code.
Use this as a CSS reference.
Most of these templates are pretty good valid code.
4-Learn what the various HTML tags are, and what they are to be used for.
Use this as an HTML reference.
5-Get an HTML validator for FireFox. I use this one.
6-Get FireBug for FireFox.
7-Make sure to test your code on at least IE6, IE7, FireFox and Opera. I know that there are others, but these are probably most important.
Use this to be able to have IE6 and IE7 installed at the same time.

 

For the reasons Foo mentioned... I've heard some persuasive arguments by people who really do know how to code "by hand" that they can be even faster with DW-- the important thing being that they screw with all the settings to get it to do exactly what it should do-- its defaults leave invalid tags and bs everywhere (I just luv that mm_ImageSwapLoader thingie... gawd). If you already know what you're doing apparently you can set it up that way, but I didn't see that as being the OP's situation.

Lots of people have said they learned how to HTML and CSS code by using dreambeaver-- if it was their only source of information then they learned a lot of bad habits which they either still have or have unlearned.

That said, I shouldn't bash it anymore -- I sure don't like PS people bashing GIMP either. We do have our own software prefereneces.

 

As good as this add-on is it doesn´t validate right. I have it installed and i also checked with http://validator.w3.org/ and it showed that i have few errors. The add-on showed that i have no error and that the site is valid.

 

Fair enough then, there are some valid points there.

I use DW to code by hand, the only time I ever use visual is when i'm using absolute pos. to overlay something, otherwise I ignore it and use IE and FF to preview.

Don't forget that Safari runs natively in windows now too, so it's easier to check.

I use a lot of Spry datasets, not the widgets they package with DW, for which dw has the correct syntaxs etc. It can still add a lot of crap to your code.

Yeah, I see your points, it's not a magic wand that will help you make sites. As long as you know whats valid its a er, valid tool, if you're working on a lot of sites at once that all need to run on a local server via PHP mySQL you get a huge amount of help from DW.

 

I've had Safari-for-Blows at work now for a few weeks. It's really neat. It even keeps the crappy font-antialiasing thingo Macs do, which is even better... supposedly I can see a site like a "real" Mac user : )
I guess the biggest problem with DW is that it's a tool that lets visual people (ie the photoshopper-types) build a site by sight (no pun). While someone who knows what they're doing also knows how to check their code, the target audience for DW isn't that person. That's likely where all the crappy DW-built sites are so.

I'd also say, DW isn't the only tool that can add nasty code. Any of those blog templates with "skins" etc are damned hard to change, and the whole widget thing-- many of them being brought into the page with their own <html></html> tags!

I never encourage people to learn with something like a WYSIWYG because they can't learn how to actually code in it (and thus not learn how to do maintanence and changes, usually where the problems really come up). For someone to pay that huge amount of money and then only look in Code View... kinda defeats the purpose, you know? Cause it's marketed as a Visual Page Builder. Better to learn on something like Notepad or whatever, and then if DW falls into your lap or you get some great student rate or something, then you can take advantage of its extras (I hear a lot about this FTP function... nothing I could ever benefit from cause I've got Gnome Desktop Environment which has a nice direct-edit set-up).