Quick Tips for Everyone!
Your webpage is great, but it needs some tweaking. DreamWeaver can help! If you’re tired of plain gray buttons, you can use DreamWeaver’s prebuilt flash buttons. Click on “Insert,” then “Media,” then “Flash Button,” and you can select from dozens of options. You can even input whatever you’d like the button to display. Depending on what your button is supposed to do when clicked, you may need to check that it still functions correctly with the new format before going “live.”

DreamWeaver also makes rollover images and creating hotspots easy. Simply click “Insert,” then “Image,” then “Rollover Image.” The program will now walk you through finding the original image, and then how you want the image to change once a patron hovers over that image.

A hotspot is a defined area within an image that you choose for a hyperlink. From the "Image" dropdown menu, select what kind of hotspot you want to draw: rectangular, circular, or polygonal. Click on an image in your HTML document to begin drawing your hotspot. In the "Properties" menu at the bottom of the screen, input the URL to which you would like your users to be taken when they click on that part of the image.

You can also easily insert Meta tags, keywords and descriptions into the "Header" section of your website using DreamWeaver.

From the "Head" dropdown menu, select which of the tags, keywords, or description for your website you’d like to define. You may already have these elements on your website, but have been unaware of them.

Meta tags and keywords help search engines find your page easier. Descriptions help users with disabilities process your page through their computers.

Another fancy tool DreamWeaver gives you is the ability to swap easily back and forth between the code side and the display side of your webpage while you're designing. You can also view both at once.

Clicking an object in your display view will highlight the code that applies to that object in the code view. This is particularly useful if you just needed to paste the code for a link or image onto your blog or other externally hosted webpage.

For example, you could design a table of images in DreamWeaver, and then paste the code into other online applications that accept HTML coding.

You now know enough to be dangerous, so have fun! Be sure to test your pages first before copying over your existing webpage. For more information on the web about web design, contact Michelle Oleson at olesonm@tblc.org or check out the following links.