The main challenge in CSS web page layout is positioning blocks of content in different parts of the browser window. The key HTML element used to achieve this is the DIV element (short for DIVISION). The DIV element is pure vanilla: it has no inherent properties or sub-elements (unlike the TABLE element which was originally used for web page layout). It is a block element which can contain any web page content, including other DIVs.

Groups of related elements within the HTML page are placed within the various DIVs. For example, there might be a DIV containing a logo or banner, another containing navigation links, another containing the main content of the page, and so on. Another common practice is to place all DIVs inside an outer or wrapper DIV which acts as the overall container for the page content. Key attributes such as width and alignment can then be applied to this wrapper.

When controlling DIVs with CSS, the key DIVs being used for page layout will normally be given a unique ID; for example, div ‘id=”leftCol”‘. IDs can only occur once within an HTML page and can therefore be referred to in the CSS code; for example ‘#leftCol…’. Some subordinate DIVs (i.e. those contained within the main DIVs) will share attributes with several other DIVs on the page. These will be defined as a class in both the HTML page; e.g. ‘div class=imageLeft’ and in the CSS style sheet; e.g. ‘.imageLeft…’.

You will generally set the overall width you want your page content to occupy by setting the width of the outer wrapper DIV which contains the entire page. The width that you choose will depend on the typical monitor resolution used by your anticipated audience. The lowest common denominator is probably 800 x 600 pixels but many designers are now assuming 1024 x 768. Bear in mind that these pixel dimensions represent the entire screen. The actual web content will occupy only some of this. For this reason, designers usually use a width of 760 pixels when targeting the smaller resolution and 950 pixels when targeting the larger.

You can specify the dimensions of your content in two ways in CSS: using a fixed measurement or using percentages. Using pixels to specify the width you want your content to occupy offers you more control over your design but it can be inconvenient for visitors to your website. If their monitors are larger than your specified width, there will be a lot of wasted space. Those whose monitors are not as wide as your content will have to constantly scroll left and right to read your pages and who can blame them if they lose patience and go elsewhere. Percentage-based design is often referred to as liquid in that the content will simply readjust to fill as much of the available space as you specify.

Author is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Training, a UK IT training company offering ASP.NET Classes at their central London training centre.

Are you one of the many people who maintain an account in one or more of the popular social networking sites like Friendster, Twitter, Facebook, and Multiply? If you do, then you could be one of the people who make sure that you have a good web design. The craze with regards to social networking sites have hit every person we know, and you’re not ‘in’ if you don’t have one. But web design is more than using it in your Facebook accounts. You can also use this to make your other sites rank well in search engines.

Web designing is becoming a fad in the cyber world. More so, a computer related profession hones web design making. As a matter of fact, you can acquire a web page design career diploma. Your creativeness will come in handy in designing a web page. Just flaunt your extra ordinary graphic arts design.

Web design has sort of become a trend in the online community. A lot of people have, one way or another, dabbled in web designing. You don’t have to be really skilled in web design, you just need to be creative. But for those who maintain sites for their businesses, you may need to hire the services of web designers.

Did something just pop out on your screen? Is it telling you to shift into a bubblier web design? Your webpage got to be exceptional to attract more visitors. It is one of the things that make a website interesting. You have to put a nice web design especially if you have some business online.

If you’ve noticed, search engines like Yahoo and Google also change their web design frequently. You can see different themes once in a while. That may depend as well on promotional matters of the website. For example, Yahoo established a lilac web design in conjunction with its purple hunt contest. This technique indicates that know-how on essential web publishing skills gives far-reached results you can never imagine.

Another online craze, blogging, has also become one of the means by which people dabble with web design. People who maintain their own blog, regardless of the niche, use web design as a way of increasing their chances of getting ranked well. It doesn’t matter if you have a personal or a business blog since most blog owners are concerned with getting to a lot more audience. And you can do that if you rank well in the search engines.

It would really help if you have some knowledge in web design. You will have an advantage over the others who have limited knowledge. If you want to make the most out of your website, you can try looking for different online guides about web design.

Almost all the websites that you visit cater to various designs. You may not be pleased with some. You can be funky, hip and natural on your web design. But what’s important is that you express yourself. Web designing may just be one way of showing the world how imaginative you are. Who knows this may be a possibility of starting a lucrative career.

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If you are wondering how web design training can help your business succeed, it is quite simple. Everyone has experienced the same thing: you are surfing the internet looking for goods or services and you find a site which has problems. It might be that the site takes forever to download, it may be that it uses bizarre imagery and poor design, you may find it difficult to find what you were looking for on that site. It is unlikely that you will ever return and that means that website has failed what it wanted to do. And that is to attract attention to the information it is presenting or the products it is selling.

Why is web design important? You need to make sure that users who are visiting your website can find the products, services or information they are looking for. You need a website which functions the way it is supposed to and that brings together different elements including text, graphics and layout. If you do not have the training in different design programs, you will not have the tools to create sites which customers want to visit again and again.

There are different ways that you can go about getting web design training. You can choose to take different individual courses in the programs which you will be using, or you can take a course which will give you a diploma in web development and design. Either choice can be excellent but it depends on how extensively you will be using your design skills.

If you want to learn business related web design applications, you should concentrate on courses such as writing for search engine optimization, e commerce related programs and general site design concepts so that you can generate a professional and logically designed website. Web designers that are making a career of the business learn basic design principles, information on incorporating images and video, and special applications such as flash animation.

Even if you are more interested learning to design websites for yourself and relatives there are some principals that will carry through from the commercial side of the business. You will want to make sure that your site will load well no matter what the connection speed is of the people viewing it. You will also want to make sure that people can find the information they are looking for. Web design training can help you achieve all of these things and more.

Remember that computers are advancing every day and new versions of software are coming out. They are also introducing new web design programs on a regular basis so you might find that even after completing a course of study you will need to take additional courses from time to time. Keeping on top of the industry by reading magazines and trade journals is also critical if you want to stay up to date.

Web design training might be the best thing you could do to ensure you have the knowledge and skills to design sites properly. Beautiful and functional websites must be built properly and according to specific rules and requirements. Learning how to do this is not hard but it will take some time and effort to do so.

The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Training, an independent computer training company offering Web design Classes at their central London training centre.

Whenever you build a new website, you can almost guarantee that you will make mistakes and that there will be errors within the site that need to be fixed before it goes live. Adobe Dreamweaver has a number of tools for helping you to locate such errors and correct them. The program allows you to perform browser compatibility checks, locate broken links, orphaned files and locate syntax errors within your code.

Site testing should be an integral part of building a web site and not an isolated step which is performed after the site has been built. Every page that forms part of the site should function correctly in all its aspects in all of the browsers which the site is designed for. Using Adobe Dreamweaver’s various reports is a great way of ensuring that your site is error-free.

A key aspect of site testing is to preview your pages in as many browsers as possible. Dreamweaver’s Preview in Browser feature allows you to set up primary and secondary browsers and then add as many other browsers as you like. Each time you choose File – Preview In Browser, you can choose any of the browsers you have configured. You should also try to preview your web pages both on PCs and Macs. This multi-browser testing is particular important for testing that CSS and JavaScript is functioning correctly. What works well in one browser does not always work in another.

It is also very important to check both the text and the markup of each page. A simple omission made by many web developers is to check spelling. Naturally, this can be done in a word-processor such as Microsoft Word, prior to bringing the text into Dreamweaver. However, even in this scenario, it is quite typical to make further changes to your text within Dreamweaver. It is always a good idea, therefore, to run the spell-checker on every page. In Design mode, simply choose Check Spelling from The Command menu.

Broken links are another type of error which it is important to eliminate. These are, if nothing else, a potential cause of annoyance to your website visitor. Dreamweaver’s Link Checker will look for any links to pages that do not exist as well as locating orphaned pages; i.e., pages that do not have any links pointing to them and which will therefore not be found by your website visitors. To access Dreamweaver’s Link Checker, choose Check Links Sitewide from the Site menu.

Any business, online or offline, will greatly benefit from a well-done website. This is the one tool that makes the difference between a successful business from a failed one. If you have a product or service that you are trying to sell, having a very good and appealing web design will prove to be very helpful for you.

But how can you come up with a decent web design that will help you call on customers to go to your site and buy your product? With all the many websites present today, it can be hard to stand out. You have to find a way how you can get the attention of your potential market.

Here are some tips on how you can come up with a good web design:

When you start out, make sure that you look for a web host that is reasonably priced. Make sure that you look for one that fits your budget.

Make sure that your web design is simple and easy-to-understand. You don’t have to come up with a complicated one because it may cost you customers. Simple is better because it is more effective.

Maintain uniformity in your web design. You need to make sure that every page on your site, even though they may offer different products, is in accordance with the whole look of the site. This will make it easy for them to associate your products to your site.

Choose the font type, color, and layout of the site carefully. You need to make sure your web design is easy on the eyes. Coordinate colors and font types appropriately. Make sure that all the elements jive well together. Do not too small or too large fonts because this will only make your readers not want to read your content. Choose proper colors also. As much as possible, avoid very strikingly bright, neon-like colors because it is not easy on the eyes.

Make sure that you test the site first before launching it. You need to let others take a look at your web design for errors and improvements. Since you are the one who made it, you can have the tendency to have a blind spot on your work. Others will be able to spot any room for improvements better.

When building websites with Adobe Dreamweaver, you will find yourself alternating between two main views of your web pages: files and document. The Files panel gives you an overview of the entire site and work with the entire site structure. It shows listings of the files in your local root folder and on your server. When you open any document, by contrast, you work on one HTML page at a time, adding and modifying content as necessary.

Once you have finished defining your site, Dreamweaver will open the Files panel automatically and the site you have just created will be the active site. You can also enter site Files view at any time by choosing Window – Files. You can activate a particular site by choosing its name from the site pop-up menu. You can also choose Site – Manage Site and then select the desired site name and click Done.

By default, the files panel shows two listings: on your right, the files in your local root folder are displayed; on your left are shown the files on your server. The toolbar above the file listing contains tools for uploading and downloading files to and from your server. Moving your mouse over an icon displays a tooltip explaining its function. The Connect button is used to establish a connection to the remote server. The Put button uploads the selected file(s) to the server. The Get button downloads files from the server.

Immediately after defining a new site, the next step is usually to create all of the HTML files your site will need together with any necessary subdirectories. To create a new file or folder in a particular folder, right click the name of the folder (or of one of the documents inside it) and choose New File or New Folder from the context menu. You can also highlight the relevant folder (or a document inside it) then choose New File or New Folder from the File menu. When creating documents, be sure to enter the necessary file extension: you may type either “.html” or “.htm”. Naturally, folder names do not need an extension.

One of the main benefits of creating all the files needed for a web site in Files panel view before beginning to edit any documents is that links between pages can then be created by browsing for the linked page which otherwise would not yet exist. Dreamweaver also has a useful Point to File facility whereby a link can be created by dragging from the link object to the linked file.

Next to each folder which contains items, Dreamweaver displays a plus sign (+) is shown. To display the contents of a folder, simply click once on the plus sign. When the contents of a folder are displayed, the plus sign changes to a minus. To hide the contents of a folder, click the minus sign.

Using Dreamweaver’s Files panel view is very similar to working in Windows Explorer or the Macintosh Finder. To delete a file or folder, click once on the item to highlight it then press Delete or Backspace. You can also right-click on the file or folder and choose Edit-Delete from the context menu. It is also important to remember that the site listing is a live indication of a section of your hard disk. When you delete a file or folder, you are deleting an item from your hard disk in real time.

To select a non-contiguous range of files and/or folders, click on the first item then, with the Control (Command) key held down, click on each of the items you wish to add to the selection. The items being selected can be in separate folders and you may collapse and expand folders during the operation without destroying the selection.

To change the name of a file or folder in Files panel view, click on it with the right mouse then choose Edit – Rename from the context menu. You can also click twice on the current name of the item, taking care that the two clicks are on slightly different parts of the name. The name will then be highlighted, ready to be edited.

The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with Macresource Computer Training, a UK IT training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver Classes in London and throughout the UK.

A web page is pure text and is therefore incapable of embedding images in the way that word processing documents can. Instead the page contains a reference to the image which enables the browser to locate and display the image when necessary. Images must be therefore be uploaded to the server along with the HTML pages. This can only take place properly if the images are located in Dreamweaver’s local root folder. Whenever you insert a graphic which is not located in the root folder of the active site, Dreamweaver displays a dialogue offering you the opportunity of saving this image in the current root folder. When this message appears, you should click the Yes button and save the image somewhere in the current root folder.

Dreamweaver Assets panel (Window – Assets) can also be used to insert images. Basically, the Assets panel displays elements which have already been used within your Dreamweaver site(s). Assets are arranged according to category: to change the category, simply click on one of the icons on the left of the panel. Images can be found in the first category. All existing image assets are available for use within your documents by simply dragging them onto a page.

If you ever need to change an existing image for an alternative, simply double-click the existing image. A dialogue labelled Select Image Source appears. This is the same dialogue which appears when the Insert Image command is used. Locate and double-click the replacement image.

As a general rule, images should be saved at the size at which they need to appear on the web page. However, where the same image appears on different pages at different sizes, it is useful to import the same image each time and resize it as necessary. This works best if the image is saved at the largest size required and reduced in size on those pages where it needs to smaller. To resize an image:

1. Highlight the image.

2. While holding down the Shift key, drag the bottom right corner handle towards or away from the centre of the image. (Holding down the Shift key retains the aspect ratio of the image.)

The term rollover image refers to the effect where an image changes appearance when the mouse passes over it. This effect is created with JavaScript. However, Dreamweaver uses visual tools to generate the necessary code.

1. Position the cursor where you want the image to go, then choose Insert – Interactive Images – Rollover Image.

2. Type in a name for the image.

3. Click the Browse button next to Original Image, then locate and double-click the appropriate image.

4. Repeat the above step for Rollover Image.

5. The final step is to create a hyperlink by clciking on the Browse button next to When Clicked Go To URL then locating and double-clicking the linked file.

The writer of this article is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Training, an independent computer training company offering Adobe Dreamweaver training courses at their central London training centre.