Dreamweaver Article

Designing with CSS – Part 1: Understanding CSS Design Concepts

Note: This article has been updated for Dreamweaver 8. The CSS features in Dreamweaver have been vastly improved in Dreamweaver 8. You can learn about those changes in Julie Hallstrom's article, An Overview of CSS in Dreamweaver 8.

This article is the first in a series of tutorials about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The aim in Part 1 is to familiarize you with some of the basics of CSS. I'll review some of the problems you may run into. I'll also cover the shorthand and longhand versions of the CSS syntax.

I would like to make it clear that I do not advocate you dropping the use of tables as design elements. It is a case of what suits you best. Whatever you feel comfortable with is a good way to go. What this series of tutorials will do is provide you with the ability to create CSS layouts using Dreamweaver 8. Once you have some of the basics down, you will move on to Part 3 to create a simple but effective CSS layout.

All exercises you undertake in this series are available as downloads, so you can work alongside, or just review the code as you read through. I will keep the same structure as you work throughout the series so you can keep everything structured locally for easy reference if required.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Dreamweaver 8

• Try
• Buy

Sample files:

• css1_samples.zip (ZIP, 2K)

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