Customer Reviews

Creating a Web Page in Dreamweaver: Visual QuickProject Guide

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

This book is an excellent guide to begin making projects in Dreamweaver. Easy step by step instructions. Anyone can use this computer program if they follow this book!

I have been using Dreamweaver since version 2 and know it pretty well. I purchased this book for my brother because he wanted to learn about Dreamweaver and how to make a simple site. He told me that he was having problem getting through this book. I took a look at it and sure enough p 25 I hit the first problem. The section talks about adding images to a page, but I haven't made a page to add it to. I went and looked on the author's website and he has a section called errors. There he explains that he thought you would use your own page design not the one in the book, even though in the last chapter you just created the home page for this fictional site. As I continued I found this book riddled with error. My suggestion STAY AWAY!!!

Creating websites in Dreamweaver can be as easy as using your favorite word processing program which is one reason that Dreamweaver is the most popular program for building websites and web applications. This is the approach that the author, Nolan Hester, takes in this book. The concept behind the Visual QuickProject Guide series is to give readers clear illustrations and step-by-step instructions to complete the QuickProject without overwhelming them with a multitude of details. Macromedia Dreamweaver is a large and powerful program but Hester does a great job of explaining how to create a webpage within Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG Design View.

After you become familiar with the workspace, Hester gets right to work on the homepage for your site. One nice feature of Dreamweaver is support for Cascading Style Sheets which is used to format webpages. By using Dreamweaver's Design View to generate this CSS code, Hester never burdens readers with the details of the raw code. Instead he gives step-by-step instructions on formatting text and page properties for the homepage using the Property Inspector and Style menus. You will find his instructions very similar to using a word program.

Next, Hester explains how easy it is to create image maps and to perform basic image editing tasks within the Dreamweaver program. You are now ready to use the Property Inspector to insert and format your images into your webpage. He then moves on to populating HTML tables with data and sorting the data. Finally, he shows how to use Dreamweaver's drag and drop feature to create internal, external, anchor and email links.

After these basics are covered, Hester discusses Dreamweaver's time-saving features. For example, he explains how to use webpage templates and reusable sections of code, called Library Items, to streamline your work. Finally, he discusses how to use the FTP features in Dreamweaver to upload and maintain your website on an external server.

Nolan Hester is a popular PeachPit author of a dozen+ books on computer subjects such as Adobe Photoshop Album, Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver.

I really don't like this book -- here's why:

The Visual QuickProject series is "supposed" to be designed to provide you with a quick, basic, step-by-step instruction guide that helps you to rapidly learn how to use a particular software product, such as DreamWeaver. This book DOESN'T EVEN come close to this idea...

Instead, (with the exception of the first 24 pages), the book mostly reads like a dry, topical help manual with no step-by-step, project-related instructions to follow. Sorry Mr. Hester -- your book has definate potential, but it needs to be designed to teach, not simply provide generalized help topics.

It is very difficult to design a web page just using this book since some of the steps do not work as stated in the book. eg. Page 56, link text internally. Following the steps will get you nowhere fast. If you are thinking of buying this book take my advice and keep looking.

In chapter 4 titled 'add tables', there is a section titled 'import tabluar data.' Try as you will, the instructions just DONT WORK, so the book fails right there. One cant continue with the tutorial as this is a important part of the book. On the authers web site ( http://www.waywest.net/dwvqj/ ), under 'errors' he staes he forgot to place it in the zip file. Then he has a link to it. Its in a wacked out .rtf formate and can not be open. Its a corrupt file. Until this section is addressed, the book is trash.