Intro to Dreamweaver Week 2

After spending our first week of the online Intro to Dreamweaver class concentrating on learning the user interface, students are eager to style their pages. This is a Dreamweaver course, but I stress the importance of best practices in web design and development. This includes basic design principles as well as separation of concerns. Separation of concerns means keeping the HTML of your page separate from the styling information and separate from the scripts that add interactions to your pages. This week we add CSS and next week we add scripts to our web pages.

The goals of week 2 are to learn how to best use CSS in Dreamweaver to style your pages. The focus is on learning the interface more than creating an award winning design at this point. We start with some basic CSS styling to practice then move on to styling a simple CSS based layout.

Assignments for week 2 includes:

• Revising the home page created last week with relative links to this week’s work
• Create an index page for week 2 using a CSS layout
• Create a page describing one of your favorite things
  • Play with different CSS styling for your text using different fonts, colors, size, weight and alignment
  • Include absolute links to other web sites related to your favorite things
• Validating pages for W3C
• Testing pages in multiple browsers