Chad Hurd

These chapters gave me a great overview of web design in general as well as the Dreamweaver application. I learned that while I really want to jump into creating my very own website, I should plan the ideas I want my website to portray. Things I need to think about while planning my website are the business requirements, user requirements, technical specifications, and design requirements. Planning should include what my ultimate goal with the site is. From a user’s standpoint, I need to think about how easy my site is to access and use as well as the content that I have on my page. I learned that HTML, also known as hypertext markup language and its tags are the basis for all web pages. I also found out that the Dreamweaver application is the tool that makes HTML and CSS creation simple. I have learned that CSS or cascading style sheets is how I give my website its personality. CSS helps you keep your visual properties separate from your content on the page. You can also have internal and external CSS files. These CSS files can be applied to multiple HTML pages. CSS style consists of selectors and properties. I have found out the three most important tools I will use in Dreamweaver are files, insert, and CSS Designer. I also learned I need to save all my graphics or media to the folder for my website. It is simple to use Dreamweaver to add organization to my webpage. For instance, I can start with a mess of text and select what parts of my page I want them to be in and Dreamweaver does the rest. I learned that I could use live view to be able to see what my page is going to look like. One of the most important things I will need to do is set up a local site folder for all my files to be saved to. A new CSS styles file will need to be created for my website in the same folder as my index.html file. Selectors are one of the most important parts in terms of CSS styling. To edit different parts of my page I will need to use different selectors to select the particular parts of the page I want to change. I will use the properties tab to adjust the styles of my website including width, height, color, and font style. Using “ems” in the font size properties box will make the text of my site scalable.
While inserting images or photos into my website I should create an images folder inside my websites local folder. To make extracting images easier, there is an extract tool I can use within Dreamweaver to extra images from photoshop images. While adjusting images, always make sure that you are selecting to correct selector in your selectors bay on the side.
Hyperlinks are an easy to navigate around the World Wide Web. With Dreamweaver it is very easy to insert hyperlinks; I will have to make sure I am inserting the right path to the file which should be in my local website folder. Using CSS Transitions can make navigating around my page more interesting for the user and will make it more enjoyable to navigate to a different page. I need to always make sure I change the title of my page or else when a user browses to the page it will say untitled document. To make additional pages I can just click save as and rename the file name to the name of the page I want to create.