Accessibility
Stephanie Sullivan

Stephanie Sullivan

W3Conversions

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Preparing and Creating the Site Structure
  3. CSS Styles Panel and CSS Tools
  4. What to Watch Out For
  5. A Touch of Styling
Created:
30 March 2006
User Level:
Intermediate
Products:
Dreamweaver

Tableless Layouts with Dreamweaver 8

If you've been doing web development for years and you've decided to take finally a look at "all this CSS stuff" you've been hearing about, it will likely require a bit of a paradigm shift. If you're a new developer and you're starting out by learning how to separate the structure of your document from its styling and presentation, you likely won't find it quite so difficult.

Using CSS to position the elements on your page is a very powerful thing. In this article I'll review a simple page layout, show you how to create it in Dreamweaver 8, and discuss some of the things you need to consider as you build.

If you're just starting out with Dreamweaver 8, you'll likely find Julie Hallstrom's article, An Overview of CSS in Dreamweaver 8, helpful in understanding the new tools available to you. As I mention them later, and if you aren't familiar with them, please refer to this article. Though this article is about building a simple site without tables, I'm first going to cover how I personally set up Dreamweaver to write clean code. Your mileage may vary.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Dreamweaver 8

Sample files:

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About the author

In demand by top U.S. firms, Stephanie Sullivan is a world-class web standards, Dreamweaver, and accessibility expert whose razor-sharp CSS and (X)HTML skills make her company, W3Conversions, a peerless authority for training corporate web teams and transforming in-house designs into efficient, standards-based websites. Sullivan created the CSS layouts for Dreamweaver CS3 and is coauthor of the respected project-based book Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS3 and Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS4. She's co-leader of the influential Web Standards Project Adobe Task Force, a partner at Community MX, and a speaker who engages audiences around the world with her dynamic presentations. When she's not coding or talking to the little people inside her computer, she escapes to play squash or beach volleyball. Yes, she loves 80s Wave music.