Learning Dreamweaver

No reason to use tables, Dreamweaver has a very easy to use CSS handling features...

As said, tables are for tabular data.... few years ago i would have disagreed, but today i'm all for divs, floats, css etc...

Tables are a fail safe in my opinion. If you can avoid using them you should, and learning CSS from the offset will give you more and better control off the content from the get go...

Code CSS inline to start with and you'll not have to worry about editting more then 1 file...

There's no right and wrong way to code, only preferred or favoured ways.

Having come from a freebie host web builder, to what i know now, i'd suggest what offers have and say stick with Norepad and some online tutorials and work at learning some basic XHTML and CSS, and work your way up...

Dreamweaver was overkill the first time i used it, it did nothing but confuse me. Couldn't live without it now, saves me lots of time..... though i doubt i use it as extensively as other DW users here.
 
Seriously, don't learn table-based layout. It's an outdated design philosophy and your code will be inefficient and difficult to maintain. Then you'll have to change your habits when you want to use CSS-based designs, which will be a lot harder than doing it right the first time.

The basics of CSS-based design are pretty simple. I'd start out by learning about the basic structure of an XHTML page - read about the <html>, <head> and <body> tags first, then move on to links (<a>), paragraphs (<p>), images (<img>), headers (<h1> through <h6>), lists (<ul> and <li>) and divisions (<div>). Before moving on to CSS, I'd read about the basic differences between inline and block level elements, as this is important to how your page will fit together.

As you're reading, I'd open up Notepad (or Dreamweaver in the code view) and write a basic page of your own, using the tags you've read about - there's nothing like learning by doing. Then, when you're happy with that, start reading about CSS and apply some basic styles (colors, fonts, margins, widths) to the page you've created.

This will definitely take you longer than knocking up a page in Dreamweaver - but when you're done, you'll have learned how to code a web page, rather than just how to use a particular program :)
 
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