How to Design Your Website with Adobe Dreamweaver CS4

If you are new to web development, there are several possible routes you may take in order to design a new website. There used to be a time when web design was extremely complex and only professional people with extensive experience in web designing could design a new website. The process involved lots of coding and was quite difficult for a novice to understand. However, with the advent of sophisticated user-friendly web development software, designing a new website from scratch has become very easy. This article explains how you can design a simple HTML website from scratch using Adobe Dreamweaver CS4.

The Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 application has a very user-friendly interface. It provides ample opportunity to the user to design both simple as well as complex websites. The latest version of the software includes many handy features. In order to develop your new website, you'll first need to create a new folder on your hard drive. You can give this folder the same name as your website. After this, you need to click "Site" on the main menu of Adobe Dreamweaver and then select "New Site" from the menu. This will open a new dialog box titled "Site Definition for Unnamed Site".

Under "Editing Files", enter the name of the website as well as the URL address if you have one. Clicking "Next" takes you to the "Editing Files, Part 2" screen where you can decide if you want to use any server technology such as ColdFusion, ASP.NET, ASP, JSP, or PHP etc. The default option is "No", and you do not need to change this option as you are creating only a simple HTML website. The next screen "Editing Files, Part 3" asks you how you want to work with your files during development. The default option is "Edit local files on my machine", which you do not need to change. This screen also allows you to browse to the exact website folder on your hard drive.

The next screen "Sharing Files" asks you how you would like to connect to your remote server. Here you can select "FTP" if you have the relevant information from your web hosting provider at hand, or you can select "None" and click "Next" to move to the last screen. Clicking "Done" on the last screen of this dialog box will create your new website within Adobe Dreamweaver. Now, in order to create a new HTML webpage, you'll need to click on "File" and then "New". Alternatively, you can also press "Ctrl+N" similar to many other Windows applications.

In the "New Document" dialog box that appears, you can select the Page Type as well as the Layout of the new page you are about to design. If you are a novice, the best option for you would be to select "HTML" in the Page Type, since other types such as PHP, ASP, JSP, or ColdFusion are suitable only for advanced level web programmers. You can also select a suitable Layout for your new webpage. That's all! You have just created a page for your new website. If you're not entirely satisfied with the layout, you can also create your new page using the "Table" command from the "Insert" menu. Also, you can keep experimenting with the commands located in the different menus in order to refine your newly created webpage progressively.

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