Choosing Your Tools

Choosing Your Tools

Using the answers to the questions already outlined, the next step in the process is to determine what tools you need to produce the client's site.

From your conversation with the client, you know that they do not have a website already, so you need to plan the structure of the site and develop a layout. This process can be done with good old-fashioned pen and paper or by using some of the diagramming tools found in Fireworks 8.

After you have a basic layout developed, you need to create the underlying graphics that can be inserted into the pages. Using Fireworks, you can create the company's new logo and any navigation buttons that are needed for the site.

The client also mentioned that they would like to have an About Us page that has a slideshow of photos of the employees , facilities, and so forth. Using Flash, the slideshow can be created with an XML document that allows the client to easily update the slideshow if a new employee is hired , someone leaves the company, or a new facility is acquired .

Finally, because they hope to grow their inventory of motorcycles continually, the details about each motorcycle for sale will be stored in an Access database, which will be connected to their ColdFusion-based web pages. To accomplish this, we can use the Developer's edition of ColdFusion, along with Dreamweaver, to produce and test the dynamic pages.

You may have noticed that the project conveniently uses each of the programs included in the Macromedia Studio. As you progress through the chapters, you will get a better understanding of the role that each program plays in the project lifecycle and why the combination of the five programs makes the Studio suite so powerful.

Streamlining Your Development

Now that you know what tools will be involved throughout the project, let's look at some elements you can design to streamline the development of the site and minimize the time it takes to complete the project.

The first reusable tool would be the site template. Developing a template for the page's layout not only decreases development time by allowing you to reuse the same template over and over, but it ensures that each page within the site uses the same basic elements and code.

As you will see later on, using a template makes it especially easy when you need to replace an image or object on every page within the site. Templates are covered in more depth in the Dreamweaver section of the book, but as you proceed, it's a good idea to have the concept of a reusable template on your mind.

Another reusable element that you can take advantage of is called a snippet . The term refers to a small " chunk " of code that you can conveniently store and reuse over and over. For each project that you create, it's a good idea to create snippets out of any code that you might find useful on other projects. This saves you time and energy re-creating code and ensures consistency across your various sites. As you proceed through the project, I'll point out areas where you might consider creating a code snippet for reuse later.

Cascading style sheets (CSS) also speed the development of your site. A single style sheet can contain all the various ways to format text and objects within your site. This single document is then linked to every document in your site, making those styles available in one central location. The nice thing about style sheets comes when you want to change a style. Instead of changing it on every single page in the site, you just change it in the style sheet and the change propagates out to every page that relies on the style sheet. Over the past few years , Dreamweaver has really integrated CSS into the development process, making it much easier to manage. With the latest release of Flash, Macromedia has continued focusing on CSS by improving the capability to use CSS to format Flash-based content.

One additional set of streamlining tools that I focus on are library objects . As you will see, library objects enable you to store and reuse objects such as images, sounds, movie files, and more by simply dragging and dropping them into your pages. Another nice feature of library objects is the fact that they are reusable in nearly every application in the Studio suite. For instance, graphics created in Fireworks can be used in Flash and Dreamweaver and can even be quickly edited in any of these applications through the round-trip features built in to Flash, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver. As I cover each application, I point out situations where round-trip functionality might apply.

With these reusable elements at your disposal, the last issue you need to consider before you start looking at the Studio tools themselves is that of supplemental software.