Working with Dreamweaver

A professional-quality Web page editor and site manager.

More than you'll need

Dreamweaver is designed for professional use, to create cutting-edge Web sites from scratch. As a result, there's more to this tool than you'll need. It can be a bit overwhelming, especially when you first start working with the program. Don't worry -- it gets easier, and if you learn to ignore the advanced features that you won't use, the program works very well.

Getting started: take the guided tour

DW comes with a guided tour that gives a very good overview of the program. Start at the pulldown "Help...Guided Tour."

Create a local site

Even if you're just making one page, DWs site management features (including simple publishing) make it worth the few minutes of setup. Put the local site on a network drive (or local drive, but they don't get backed up) in a subfolder with a descriptive title (e.g. "web - career services"). Web folders are exclusive -- do not put anything other than Web content in a Web folder. If you have more than one DW site, use separate folders for each, but keep them in the same location.

Use Help

DWs help is quite good, especially the context-sensitive help (look for small question mark icons in the upper right of most windows).