Learning Dreamweaver

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Hamster

Hamster

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I want to start learning Dreamweaver from scratch and there are a few tutorial CDs available, eg lynda.com, VTC, Total Training.

Has anyone taken the plunge by using anything like this or have any recommendations for a complete beginner?

Thanks
:)
 
chrisxuk said:
I found it easy to learn :)

Check this out
http://www.thesitewizard.com/gettingstarted/dreamweaver1.shtml
Click to expand...

Thanks for that :)

Ross1234 said:
I think its easier just to learn to code, and it will save you the cost. You will also get better results.
Click to expand...

Thanks :) I take it you mean learning to use html. Someone else told me to start with that as it would give me a better grounding and understanding when going on to use something like dreamweaver as i will be able to understand the code view (or something along those lines!! :)). I'll look into that; i see there are a few html tutorial links in the sticky.

radderfire said:
I found the inbuilt tutorials in Dreamweaver were pretty good.

What do you want to be able to do web design wise, i.e. what's the end goal?
Click to expand...

I'm a member of a table tennis club and their website is outdated and pretty badly designed. I'd like to get to a standard where i can competently design a better site, upload it and be comfortable with making changes and additions to it. The bonus is that i will have learned a new skill :)
 
Last edited:
Joe a good book for starting html is "Head First html with css and xhtml".

I would recommend that first and notepad, then if you want to move to dreamweaver in the future it should be pretty simple.
 
I would learn a bit about HTML, the first thing to look at is table structure.

I still use an extremely simple table structure for most of my designs, a 760px wide table with two columns, the left col 500px wide, the right 260px wide. You can then fill the columns with paragraph text or put further tables into these if necessary, but the basic advice is keep a very simple main table layout structure. In fact, here's the html:

Code: 
<table width="760" border="0" cellpadding="5">
  <tr>
    <td width="500">&nbsp;</td>
    <td width="260">&nbsp;</td>
  </tr>
</table>

It's good to understand the <table> <tr> and <td> tags, they are fundamental.

See also Web Design Tutorials, I liked the Web Monkey ones when I was learning.

Rgds
 
JoeMama said:
I want to start learning Dreamweaver from scratch and there are a few tutorial CDs available, eg lynda.com, VTC, Total Training.

Has anyone taken the plunge by using anything like this or have any recommendations for a complete beginner?

Thanks
:)
Click to expand...

Despite what others have said about learning the code not everybody wants or has the aptitude to do that. Dreamweaver gives you the ability to build a very nice site without knowing much about HTML.

I learn better from books and have found the Visual Quickstart Guides to be very useful.
I would suggest that you do not use tables as they are very much yesterdays news. If you are just starting out use CSS.
 
I had a look for that book you mentioned Chaos and the thought of even picking up a 694 page book is a bit daunting no matter how good the explanations are but thanks anyway :).

Radderfire, thanks for the advice :). I think i'll get a brief grounding in html using something like the webmonkey tutorials then move onto dreamweaver. If the included tutorials aren't for me then i'll look into some kind of video tutorial as i tend to find them more engaging than following text books.

konicky - thanks for the tips :)

Any more advice and guidance is welcome :)
 
radderfire said:
Stuff
Click to expand...

You're kidding right?

I would certainly suggest someone just starting out should concentrate on divs and css, not tables.

While tables are certainly still valid for tabular data, they're used far far less frequently than .. well, almost all other html tags.

Tables are still typically used for layout by people who learned html in the 90's and just can't be bothered to learn newer techniques.
 
Tripnologist said:
You're kidding right?

I would certainly suggest someone just starting out should concentrate on divs and css, not tables.

While tables are certainly still valid for tabular data, they're used far far less frequently than .. well, almost all other html tags.

Tables are still typically used for layout by people who learned html in the 90's and just can't be bothered to learn newer techniques.
Click to expand...

Yup, do not use a table for your layout unless it is tabular data!

and please can people tell the difference between web design and web development!! Learning dreamweaver is web development and has nothing to do with design, completely seperate topic!
Design = photoshop and similar!
Development = dreamweaver and coding!
 
tsinc80697 said:
Yup, do not use a table for your layout unless it is tabular data!

and please can people tell the difference between web design and web development!! Learning dreamweaver is web development and has nothing to do with design, completely seperate topic!
Design = photoshop and similar!
Development = dreamweaver and coding!
Click to expand...
Yes!!!!!!!!!!

edit: !!!!
 
tsinc80697 said:
Yup, do not use a table for your layout unless it is tabular data!

and please can people tell the difference between web design and web development!! Learning dreamweaver is web development and has nothing to do with design, completely seperate topic!
Design = photoshop and similar!
Development = dreamweaver and coding!
Click to expand...

Thanks for lesson number one :) :)
 
http://www.tizag.com/htmlT/
http://www.tizag.com/cssT/

http://www.tizag.com/htmlT/reference/htmlreference.php
http://www.tizag.com/cssT/reference.php

Tizag is a good place for tutorials/references, I read through their site when I was starting PHP a few years ago and it helped a good bit for the basics!

http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/DEFAULT.asp

W3Schools is also a good place, more detailed and specific about which type of HTML you should be going towards; xHTML Strict eventually but xHTML Transitional is good to start with.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/html-css-beginners-guide/

If you want one big walkthrough then you can't beat Sitepoint. They have a good few books on everything web as well if you prefer to have a physical print copy than reading websites all the time.

http://css-tricks.com/

CSS Tricks is a great website for the more advanced CSS and jQuery. Loads of tutorials and screencasts. You can even get them through iTunes and I think, not certain, that Chris has done basic xHTML/CSS screencasts which might help you out a good amount!

Hope it all helps on the development side of things! If you need design tips then let me know and I'll get a quick post done for you! :)
 
Tripnologist said:
You're kidding right?

I would certainly suggest someone just starting out should concentrate on divs and css, not tables.

While tables are certainly still valid for tabular data, they're used far far less frequently than .. well, almost all other html tags.

Tables are still typically used for layout by people who learned html in the 90's and just can't be bothered to learn newer techniques.
Click to expand...

No, I'm not kidding. My philosophy to learning a new skill is first use the simplest technique available to achieve the objective. Learning old school web design with table based layouts will allow you to achieve the objective of editing a table tennis club website no problem (unless it has CSS-based layout I guess ...) but regardless, I feel I could teach someone to create a valid web page design that they could repeat using table-based design in around two hours, the same could not be said of CSS-based layouts.

The other problem with CSS-layouts is you can get inconsistencies in the various browsers because of the way they treat CSS differently. These are incredibly difficult to debug. My simple table based designs have never ever had a layout problem like this.

If he wants to learn CSS-layout my opinion is that can come later when he has the HTML basics mastered.

Rgds
 
radderfire said:
No, I'm not kidding. My philosophy to learning a new skill is first use the simplest technique available to achieve the objective. Learning old school web design with table based layouts will allow you to achieve the objective of editing a table tennis club website no problem (unless it has CSS-based layout I guess ...) but regardless, I feel I could teach someone to create a valid web page design that they could repeat using table-based design in around two hours, the same could not be said of CSS-based layouts.

The other problem with CSS-layouts is you can get inconsistencies in the various browsers because of the way they treat CSS differently. These are incredibly difficult to debug. My simple table based designs have never ever had a layout problem like this.

If he wants to learn CSS-layout my opinion is that can come later when he has the HTML basics mastered.

Rgds
Click to expand...


You shouldn't get inconsistencies if you code correctly and have a quick read on IE6 bugs, which are 99% VERY simple fixes.

If you can code for IE6 then everything else generally works. People seem to hate IE6 and its problems but if you can get the website working in IE6 and looking perfect then generally it will look great in every other browser.
It does have its flaws which I'm going into but if you're going to do something, do it properly. Don't start off learning old styles(tables over divs) as things like that stick in peoples minds.
Its like coding for Transitional or Strict. I always have and will code for Strict compliance as a jobs not worth doing if you don't do it properly. But as a beginner you can't say that tables are the better solution for the OP as it will put him in the wrong mindset for what is best practise and what isn't.

If you want to learn properly, learn CSS and DIVs for website layout. Use semantic coding and ensure it works in IE6/7, Firefox and Safari.
It's not hard, just more time consuming but rewarding when you know everyone will get the full experience of your websites :)
 
tsinc80697 said:
and please can people tell the difference between web design and web development!! Learning dreamweaver is web development and has nothing to do with design, completely seperate topic!
Design = photoshop and similar!
Development = dreamweaver and coding!
Click to expand...

Semantics! You can design a website without going anywhere near photoshop. Layout is all part of the design.
 
Im not going into detail on that, it just annoys me how people say I need a web designer, or I want to learn web design and they are talking about development.

Of course you can design a website without touching photostop, you can design anything without touching photoshop but if you want to use images on your website as part of the design then you'll have to use it, or similar.
 
I learnt using the w3 schools tutorial and notepad. Personally I'm not very good at learning by reading through books, I just started by getting a notepad file, changing it to a .html file, put the bear minimum of tags in (<html> <body></body></html>) and started by changing the background colour and adding some font and buggering round with that.

Soon learnt how to setup style sheets and use them to control layout and style and sort of snowballed from there. Of course if there is anything you need help with make sure you ask on here. Some very knowledgeable people. Helped me with my recent foray into PHP.
 
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