Macromedia Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver, too, comes packaged with an impressive array of page designs and layout templates to help you get started, although it does not feature a "looks like Microsoft Word" interface. (See Figure 15.5.) Instead, the interface includes a variety of toolbars, called panels, but those same panels offer a variety of ways to enhance the pages that you create.

Figure 15.5. A sample page in Dreamweaver.

Once you've designed a page to your specifications, you can create a template with editable and non-editable regions, which you then can use to build other pages on your site. What's more, if you change your template somewhere down the line, Dreamweaver automatically updates any page created with the templatea handy shortcut to ensure that the appearance of your site remains intact. You can use Dreamweaver's CSS Styles panel to create style sheet declarations by example and store those styles for recall in other pages. (See Figure 15.6.)

Figure 15.6. The CSS Styles panel easily modifies styles. The Properties Inspector displays the properties of any selected tag.

The Properties Inspector, at the bottom of the Dreamweaver workspace, enables you to review existing properties or set new properties for any page element (text, tables, images). Available properties are alignment, color, anchor tags, etc. You set the properties and Dreamweaver writes the HTML/CSS code for you.

Two of my favorite features are the Insert toolbar and Dreamweaver's new Panel groups, which appear to the right of your workspace. The panels are completely customizable, allowing you to display or hide those panels that are most frequently used by you.

• The Insert toolbar contains buttons for creating the most commonly used objects (such as images, tables, and layers).

• The CSS Styles panel contains details about the properties associated with a selected style.

• The Application panel allows you to configure databases, set up links to your remote site, and create ColdFusion components.

• The Tag Inspector panel shows you all of the attributes associated with the selected tags.

• The Files panel is similar to the Windows Explorer because it contains all of the files and folders in your Web site.

• The Frames panel visually displays the frames in your frameset helping keep you organized.

• The History panel keeps track of every action, including arrow movements, copy/paste, and text insertion that takes place on your Web page.

Dreamweaver excels at the advanced features, such as layering and XML compliance. Even though most browsers can't agree on how to support these features, Dreamweaver can check your page for compatibility with several versions of both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, and verify all your internal links.

Unlike FrontPage, Dreamweaver doesn't require special server extensions or add extraneous code to your pages, which means that you are able to use your pages with any Web host.