Learning Dreamweaver Part 1

“I’ve been busy.” has become somewhat of a reoccurring excuse as to why I’ve been neglecting to post over the lifetime of this blog, which is rather lame. It doesn’t take much time to actually draft up a topic and while I kind of do this both as an outlet for the drudgery that is my life and because I like sharing things that I learn/am interested in, you would think I would be more active. Sadly, this has not been the case and using “I’ve been busy” as an excuse just isn’t the truth. I’ll have to chalk this up to pure laziness. Most of my free time when I got off work went towards gaming on my PS4, gaming on Steam, drinking with friends or by myself (mostly by myself), reading funny articles, reading manga, or watching YouTube personalities.

 

Gotta get my daily fix of drama yo! – Source: Superfame

 

Hey, did you noticed how I used past tense to describe my after work activities? Yep, I’ve been laid off from my report analyst position; my job was moved out of state and I was replaced by automation through SSRS. Honestly though, I couldn’t be happier, I learned a lot about SQL server and Excel (might posts on both those subjects) and I didn’t really enjoy sitting in a cubicle for hours on end, no offense to those that do. I will miss the people I worked with though, the majority of them were awesome. That said, I have a solid support system, some money saved up, and unemployment coming so I’ve decided to work on improvement myself with the goal of becoming self-employed. It feels like the logical thing to do at this point.

 

How do you tackle unemployment? See above: – Source: Logospike 

 

Part of the plan to become my own boss is to gain as much knowledge in certain areas as I possibly can where I’m competent enough to do the work. Learning something new everyday and how to apply it has been a constant goal of mine for years but now that my focus on that goal often wavered due to a combination of life, laziness, and work. This changes now.

That said, I’m currently focusing on learning all there is to know about Adobe software, most notably Dreamweaver. This is a semi-continuation of the web development posts I started way back when. Just a quick aside, you know if you were to look back at my earlier posts, I would come off as having the attention span of a howler monkey. I started a number of projects but failed to finish them which is something else I’m definitely changing.

Many of you maybe asking “well what is Dreamweaver?”. Dreamweaver is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor which grants designers the ability to build and edit websites and view changes made in real-time. Professional web designers frown on the use of Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG editors arguing lack of complete control of the code and a tendency for novices to over-rely on Dreamweaver’s GUI based tools set, which are fair concerns. I, however, don’t see the harm in using Dreamweaver as a jumping off point for getting into web development as long as I focus on learning the code.

Instead of buying and utilizing a book for my jaunt into Dreamweaver, I did what any young go-getter would do when they wanted to learn a new skill, turned to YouTube. There are a plethora of tutorial videos dedicated to teaching the ins and outs of the editor. For now I have settled on a series from Timothy Training and uploaded by Joshua Kywn which seems to be code oriented. My sole concentration will be on learning the basics and building from there.

For my personal project, I am not going to follow the format seen in the videos. Instead, I will be adapting the core techniques to bring an idea for a pop culture/tech news based site to life. I am using the latest version of Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver CC

Although it has nothing to do with my idea, I like the initial website template the video uses as an example:

 

However, the barebones layout is the following:

 

First, the video walked me through the various features you have access to upon opening Dreamweaver and the proper way of getting started. While Dreamweaver does not appear all that complex, it does have a slight learning curve when it comes to setting up its menu system. Apparently, all website must have three folders images, CSS, and Javascript. Outside of the three folders, all websites must have an “index.html” page which I created using the skeletal structure building language, HTML.

The code is as follows:

 

And so far it culminated into this:

Don’t laugh at the site name, I’ll properly explain this in the second or third post.

 

While this is the barest of websites, I learned quite a bit about <div> tags and how to assign ids to them. The process in of itself isn’t difficult but it is time consuming. Well, everyone has to start somewhere. I update you on how the site is coming next time as well as provide a more in-depth explain of a few tags as I understand them.