Keeping Track of Site Components

     

Designing and developing a working, growing Web site often means keeping track of an ever-increasing assortment of HTML pages, images, links, color schemes, templates, Flash, and multimedia. As your site grows, it's harder and harder to keep everything in one place. Even if you organize your site well with folders for images, multimedia, and style sheets, you'll soon find the need to add a separate folder for navigational images or perhaps another for movies or articles relating to a particular section of your site. Navigating to these separate folders time after time during the development process can become tedious and fraught with opportunities for mistakes.

Links and color schemes present different challenges, of course. These items aren't stored in files, so you can't just navigate the folders of your site to find the link you used on one page or that very color of blue you used on another. If the same color scheme isn't used from page to page, site consistency is lost. Templates can solve the color consistency issue to some extent, as can Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but they certainly don't completely solve the problem.

Enter Dreamweaver's Assets panel (see Figure 7.1). Dreamweaver stores every major element of a site in a cache. The Assets panel is a complement to the Files panel, and indeed, they're both docked in the same Files panel group . The Files panel lists the tangible files for the site. The Assets panel lists the intangibles ” the colors, URLs, templates, images, and multimedia used on the site's pages.

Figure 7.1. The Assets panel breaks the site cache into nine categories, each of which can be viewed as a site-wide list or a user -generated favorites list of oft-used assets.

graphics/07fig01.jpg




Using Macromedia Studio MX 2004
Special Edition Using Macromedia Studio MX 2004
ISBN: 0789730421
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 339

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net