“Visual QuickProject Guide: Creating a Web Site in Dreamweaver CS3,” by Nolan Hester
Author of this post: Tara MacKay | About Blog Authors »
Most self-taught designers are pretty familiar with the Visual QuickStart series from Peachpit Press: Practical, clearly written guides to the myriad features of the software app or scripting language of your choice. New to the Peachpit family are Visual QuickProject Guides, boiling things down to a single project that covers just the need-to-know info.
The Creating a Web Site in Dreamweaver CS3 Visual QuickProject Guide is for beginners and those who need a Dreamweaver refresher. It’s clear going into the book that you won’t learn every detail about Dreamweaver, just the essentials to get a website produced and online fast. At just over 125 pages, the book is concise, and, with lots of large, full-color screenshots, it’s friendly and easy to follow
You’ll get started checking out the main Dreamweaver panels and defining your local root site, then jump right into using a Dreamweaver page layout. My favorite part is that you’ll learn to use CSS-based layouts (”tableless layouts”), keeping up with the current web standards—something that many veteran designers schooled in table layouts have yet to adopt.
This book introduces lots of the basics: adding and styling text, placing images and multimedia pieces in your layout, hyperlinks, tables, and everything else you expect to see on a standard web page. These features are all addressed quickly to keep you focused on just the basics, but there is a handy “extra bits” section at the end of each chapter noting some tips to extend what you’ve learned. While I didn’t expect to learn a ton about each individual feature, I wished there was a little more information on certain areas, especially linking. Relative link paths and broken links, for example, can confound beginners at this stage of the website design process.
I was impressed with the section on style sheets, which went into plenty of detail for this web design essential. The guide covers tag, context, and class-based styles, giving you a good start with text and layout formatting. It also addresses interactive features, so beginners can already feel like they’re producing a full-featured site with menus and forms.
The book wraps up with arguably the most important part of creating a website: getting it online. It walks you through the FTP process to get your files to your web server, and offers tips for getting found by search engines.
Working through the book, screenshots show you the progression of the author’s sample site, which, while indeed covering the essentials, doesn’t necessarily inspire the reader. A more polished design might excite readers a bit more. This, plus the book’s large, awkward font, gave me a bit of pause when I first delved in, but overall I was pleasantly surprised as I took a closer look.
There’s no question that this book will get most Dreamweaver beginners up and running fast. In just a few hours, you can go from knowing nothing about Dreamweaver to creating a CSS-based home page with images, text, and interactivity. And it’s not just beginners who can benefit—if you’re an old school web designer who’s still using tabled layouts or isn’t clear on how CSS works, this book will quickly get you up to speed and excited about your next project.
July 20th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
a highly recommended book. Gives you a good grounding to get started. With dreamweavers usable interface, you simply have to understand the way it works before you can start teaching yourself!
July 23rd, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Glad you liked it too! It’s definitely a great starting point for someone who prefers to self-teach.
July 24th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
Being an interactive art director since the mid-90’s, I admit that I’ve been using Dreamweaver for years whenever I need to get something done fast. However, I often remind beginners and students that they need at least a basic understanding of how the code works before learning a WYSIWYG tool. HTML and CSS are fundamental tools for successful web designers. They have a huge amount of influence over everything we do. Browsers do not always handle them consistently. We need to be able to understand how they work. So, I always require my students to get a good book about CSS before ever jumping into a Dreamweaver book. Any book by a known web designer will do - Cameron Moll, Eric Myer, Andy Budd, Dan Cederholm… just to name a few.