I.C.T. Department Year 7 Unit 1

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Worksheet 2
Start Designing Your Site With Dreamweaver

Before You Begin...
Before you start designing your site there are some important questions you should ask:

What's my site going to be about? This could be your favourite football team or film or even your crazy little brother or sister! Whatever you choose, make sure you can present it in an interesting way and that you can find lots of interesting info on it.

What's the purpose of my site? Web sites can have a lot of different purposes - they can set out to entertain, educate, sell stuff, or a mixture of these things. Think about what you want your site to do. For example, if you want it to be entertaining then some amusing pictures and/or text might work well.

Who's my site for? Think carefully about your visitors. What age group will they be in, e.g. 6-10 year olds?adults? teens? Are they likely to be mostly girls, boys or both? Answers to questions like these will help you decide things like which colours to use, how many pictures/cartoons to add etc.

Plan It Out On Paper
The most important page of any site is the Home Page. This page is the first one visitors see when they log onto your site. It should contain the title of your site, a brief description of what the site is about, and links to all the other pages in your site. So lets start by designing this page:
to do Begin by drawing a large rectangle and then add in the title and a short description. (You could write the title, description and links on separate pieces of paper and try putting them in different places on your rectangle - decide which arrangement looks best).

Then you'll want to think about the text, how big is it going to be?

And the pictures - most sites benefit form a graphic or two - where will you put yours?

Finally don't forget the all important colour scheme. What colour are your page backgrounds going to be? What about the text colour? Try out different schemes and see how well they work together.

Getting to Know Dreamweaver

Open Dreamweaver by double clicking it's icon, or by selecting it in the programmes fly out from the start menu.

When Dreamweaver opens you will see a main window called the document window and several smaller boxes called palettes

The document window is where you design your web page.
Maximise this window by clicking on the small square in its right hand corner.

The palettes help you put things like images into your page and help you change things like text.

  • Practice moving the palettes around by clicking on their title bar and dragging them.
  • Close a palette by clicking on the X in its right hand corner
  • Reopen a palette by choosing it from the Window menu

Setting up Your Site
Before we start making pages we need to set up our site on our computer. Dreamweaver is very good at helping you manage the files in your site, but you also need be pretty organised yourself!

vital info A web site should be saved in its very own folder. It's important that all the files you create for your site, whether they be web page files, image files, or sounds, should all be saved within this folder.


To set up a new site:
1 - From the Site menu choose Define Sites

2 - Click on New to open the Site Definition box
(Note This box looks complicated but don't worry - we are only going to need a small part of it).

3 - Click on the Folder icon - the little yellow square.- The Choose Local Folder box now appears.

4 - Now you can choose an existing folder to put your site in, or you can make a new one especially for it.

  • To choose an existing folder, click on it's icon, click on open, and then click the select button.
  • To make a new folder, click on the New Folder button and type a name, e.g. Jo's Web, double click it's icon to select it.

5 - We are now back in the Site Definition box. Type a name for your site in the Site Name text box and click OK.

6 - Dreamweaver will ask you if you'd like it to create a cache of your site. This is a special index of your files which lets Dreamweaver perform faster searches on your site and helps it keep track of your links. Choose OK.

Congratulations - You've created your site and it's ready to work on. Now the fun begins!!

Recap of Work Sheet 2

  • We thought about the sort of web site we want to create and we mapped out a design for the home page on paper.
  • We opened Dreamweaver and looked at the Document Window and floating palettes.
  • We set up a folder for our new site on our computers
Index

Introduction

Start Designing

Create your first page

Using a Table

Images and Animation

Creating a Link

Managing and Uploading

Glossary

Top Tips

Careers

Useful Links