Dreamweaver - setting page width - confused!

TheBigCheese · 24 May 2009 at 23:39

Hi guys

I am having a hearty attempt at giving Dreamweaver CS4 a go, it's my first proper attempt (using design view) and this set of tutorials: http://www.thesitewizard.com/gettingstarted/dreamweaver-cs4-tutorial-1.shtml and it's going ok so far.

What it doesn't seem to mention though is how I set the width that I want the webpage to be.

I was wanting it to be 1024 pixels across as that seems to be a pretty common standard now but I think currently it's about 1500 across....nothing worse than having to scroll a website so am I missinga simple option to resize it or is it more complicated than that?

Many thanks in advance for any answers!

TheBigCheese · 25 May 2009 at 10:49

Thanks for the posts.

OK, I've looked at the CSS styles panel, but I can't see anywhere where it says (in laymans terms), left column = 300 pixels, right column = 1200 pixels (for example).

Can you give me a pointer as to what I should be changing please...total Dreamweaver noob here!

TheBigCheese · 25 May 2009 at 11:21

Ummm, sorry, I'm still a bit unclear

(this is embarrassing!)

Am I looking in the right place?

From what I understand it, that shows me the details for all the 'boxes' making up the webpage. I've clicked on container as you have suggested...is container the 'box' round the whole page then?

Again, I'm not exactly sure what I should be changing

I'm guessing it's something to do with the 80%, but I don't want to change anything and knacker it up.

TheBigCheese · 25 May 2009 at 11:31

Ok ok smartypants lol give us noobs a chance

I think I've figured it out, it just clicked that I'm looking at % instead of pixels...so I changed the value to pt, made it 1024...well it sort of worked...it chopped off the right side of the site :eek:

but I think I've 'clicked' with it now.

Those values for sidebars etc. are all the sections of text...so if I shrink them slightly so their pixel sizes add up to 1024 I should have a website that's a standard size for viewing on 1024x768 monitors?

That seems a hell of a faff to change, I'm sure I am either doing it very wrong or an awkward way that will present me with issues later in the build... :confused:

TheBigCheese · 25 May 2009 at 12:17

OK, that's brilliant, just what I needed to hear!

Thanks very much for the help, hopefully I can move on with it a bit more easliy now!

This CSS is a bit of an odd one...way back in the day (at college) we did a bit of HTML coding and that seemed easy enough to just set your pixel width. I used to use Netobjects Fusion as well and that really was WYSIWYG, just drag the width to whatever you want...hopefully this new fangled way of doing it will be worth it...either that or I'm getting old and can't learn things the way I used to :rolleyes:

lol.

Thanks again for the help!

TheBigCheese · 25 May 2009 at 12:45

Hi, yes pt was a mistake, I'm trying to get everything into px so I know where I am with it.

As konicky suggested I have made the main body smaller but the actual page itself (containg everything) is 1024, do you mean that the whole thing is too big? Should I shrink it to...1000px to allow for the extra bits you have mentioned?