Dreamweaver CS5 Missing Manual excerpts: Behaviors, site management, and templates

This Missing Manual helps you quickly and painlessly master the latest version of this industry-standard web design and management program. Perfect for beginners who need step-by-step guidance and for longtime Dreamweaver masters who need a handy reference, this step-by-step guide helps you master this versatile program with jargon-free language, hands-on tutorials, and savvy advice from a Dreamweaver pro.

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Like the Spry tools, Dreamweaver's Behaviors let you add dynamic JavaScript programs to your Web pages without doing a lick of programming. Most Dreamweaver Behaviors have been around for a long while, but Dreamweaver CS3 added a new set of behaviors called Spry Effects that let you add dazzling visual touches like fading a photo in or out, highlighting a portion of a page with a flash of color, and shaking a <div> tag to catch a visitor's attention.

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As the dull-sounding name site management implies, organizing and tracking your website's files is one of the least glamorous, most time-consuming, and errorprone aspects of being a web designer. On the web, your site may look beautiful, run smoothly, and appear to be a gloriously unified whole, but behind the scenes, it's nothing more than a collection of varied files—HTML, images, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, Flash movies, and so on—that must all work together. The more files you have to keep track of, the more apt you are to misplace one. A single broken link or missing graphic can interfere with the operation of your entire site, causing personal—even professional—embarrassment.

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Some web designers handcraft sites with loving care, changing layouts, colors, fonts, banners, and navigation from page to page. But that approach isn't always practical—or desirable. Consistency is a good thing. Web pages that look and act similarly reassure visitors; when only important material changes from page to page, readers can concentrate on finding the information they want. Even more importantly, a handcrafted approach is often unrealistic when you're cranking out content on a deadline.

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