Naming the Web Page

By default, Dreamweaver MX creates a default Web page named Untitled Document. It is essential that you change the name of this page. Otherwise, the links to other documents will not work correctly. In this case, you are creating the home page for the Web site. The title of the Web page should be named Virtual Tide Realty. This title appears in the title bar of the Web browser, when the page is displayed. The file name, as it will be saved on the disk will be index.html.

  1. Right-click in the blank document named Untitled Document, and then click Page Properties from the context menu.
  2. The Page Properties dialog appears, as shown in Figure 2.
  3. Set the Title to Virtual Tide Realty.
  4. Set the background image to the file name of the image you chose for your background.
  5. Set the Background color to light blue by clicking the icon, and clicking the desired color from the color palette.
  6. Click OK to close the dialog box and apply the changes.

Figure 3: Page Properties dialog

It is important to set the title of the document and to save the file prior to inserting a background image, other graphic images, or links to your other Web page files. Otherwise, Dreamweaver MX will create the links as absolute links rather than relative links. If this happens, the links will not work when the Web site is uploaded to the Web Server. Next, the HTML document that you just created needs to be saved to the disk.

  1. On the menu bar, click File, and then click Save As. A Save As dialog appears
  2. Navigate to your desktop Dreamweaver file
  3. Use the file name index.html. Again, all images, and Web pages should appear in the same directory. We also suggest using all lower case characters for file names.

Having saved the document, you can now begin entering text on the page.

Entering Text on a Web Page

The steps to place text on a Web page are not that much different than the steps you would use to place text in a Microsoft Word document. The following list describes some special characteristics of placing text in a Web page with Dreamweaver MX:

  1. Enter the following text on the Index page you just created:

Virtual Tide Realty
Specialists in Kauai Real Estate
Please contact us at inquiry@vt.com

North Coast

Coconut Coast

Lihue Area

Piopu/Kapili Beaches

Virtual Tide Realty, Copyright 2003

 

Next, you will see how to copy information into Dreamweaver MX from another source (file). The descriptions of the properties are stored in a Microsoft Word document that you downloaded when you downloaded the other files necessary to complete this assignment. The name of the file is "properties.doc."

  1. Open the file named properties.doc in Microsoft Word.
  2. Copy and paste the descriptions between Word and Dreamweaver MX until you have a Web page that looks something like the one shown in Figure 3. Copy and paste operations work the same way in Dreamweaver MX as they do with any other program. You may have to hit the Enter key several times to properly space the text. Again, the goal of this assignment is not to create a page that looks exactly like the one shown in the Figure. Rather, your goal is to learn how to use Dreamweaver MX.

Figure 3: Unformatted text

At this point, all of the textual information appears on the Web page without any special formatting. The next set of tasks will help you format the page, add images, and add links.

Saving the Page

Before adding any additional formatting to the page, it should be saved. Again, save your work frequently.

  1. Click File, and then click Save from the Dreamweaver MX menu bar.
  2. Save as index.html in your Dreamweaver file on your desktop .

next: Formatting the page

previous/home