Posts Tagged ‘Dreamweaver’

what I like about CS4

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

First the disclaimer- I have only had Adobe CS4 installed for a few weeks and haven’t really dug deep deep down yet but I have had a play and I have updated some commercial work so I think I’m at a point of to be able to comments on the the CS4 update.
In Dreamweaver I love the new workspaces- it was always a pain for me that I couldn’t undock the panels and move them to the my second monitor so I have more design view room. So now that I have the option of dual screens
I love the having the code inspector open all the time big so as I edit in design view I can see properly whats happening in the code. No more split screen and having to scroll up and down continuously.
I also love that I can now open and tweak the original Photoshop documents that my images are based on directly from within Dreamweaver when previously this was only possible for Fireworks based images.
One thing that still hasn’t improved is Dreamweaver FTP client – while it may mean that I have accessed to feature such as collaborative features such as checking in and out it really is still painfully slowwwww!!!
Another feature which I like is the updated data set wizard which is a lot easier or at least seems alot easier now to add some ajax interactively. The movie below is a great intro and very easy to follow.

This is a great movie from Adobe on Web Widgets
PS: Welcome back :)

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Posted in Dreamweaver | 1 Comment »

CSS vs Tables

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

Before I begin I must admit there are many site that I really like that uses tables for layout rather than css but I think this is a reflection on the designers rather than tables therefore below are a few reason why I think website development should use css rather than tables.

  1. Separation of formatting information from content- better for updating and maintaining sites
  2. Faster page loading
  3. Redesigns are more efficient
  4. Easier for teams to maintain (and individuals)
  5. Easier for site development to be team based
  6. Accessibility
  7. Quick website-wide updates
  8. Better for SEO
  9. CSS sites download faster than tables
  10. css sites can be viewed on more devices such as mobile phones so have a greater reach and potential audience

Here are some good articles on the subject of CSS vs Tables

why-a-css-website-layout-will-make-you-money

13-reasons-why-css-is-superior-to-tables-in-website-design/

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Posted in CSS | 3 Comments »

Same navigation code on every page –different look

Monday, September 8th, 2008

Most websites highlight the navigation item of the user’s location in the website, to help users orientate themselves. This is a fundamental requirement for basic usability, but can be a pain as you’ll need to tweak the HTML code behind the navigation for each and every page. So is it possible to have the navigation highlighted on every page, without having to tweak the HTML code on each and every page? Of course it is but the answers below require a lot more tweaking than is below if you are using Dreamweaver templates- but that’s for a post next week :)

But what you need to do is assign a class to each navigation item:

<ul>
<li><a href=”#” class=”home”>Home</a></li>
<li><a href=”#” class=”about”>About us</a></li>
<li><a href=”#” class=”contact”>Contact us</a></li>
</ul>

You’ll then need to insert an id into the <body> tag. The id should be representative of where users are in the site and should change when users move to a different site section. When in ‘Home’ it should read <body id=”home”>, in ‘About Us’ it should be <body id=”about”> and in ‘Contact Us’ <body id=”contact”> etc.

Next, you create a new CSS rule:

#home .home, #about .about, #contact .contact
{
css rules go here
}

This creates rules that only takes effect when class=”home” is contained within id=”home”, and when class=”about” is in id=”about” and class=”contact” is in id=”contact”. These situations will only occur when the user is on the appropriate page, seamlessly creating our highlighted navigation item. Pretty cool!

More of this type of thing can be found here.

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/css/more-css-tricks.shtml

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Posted in Adobe CS4, CSS, Design, Dreamweaver | No Comments »