Desperately Seeking Hope! From Anyone Who Has Mastered Dreamweaver.

[nellypope]

"How hard can it be" I thought? Stupidly I said the same thing when it came to highlighting my hair, and that was an expensive disaster. I come to Dreamweaver from a Print design background. Having been an experienced Graphic Designer and Art Editor for 8 years (fully competent in Photoshop, PageMaker, CorelDraw and Illustrator) I am trying to make the natural progression into web design, with very slow results. The HTML makes sense to me (although I can't code completely in it . . . yet) but CSS in Dreamweaver is frying my brain on a daily basis. It's taken me two weeks (I have two toddlers to look after at the same time, so two weeks is a pro rata, part time, guesstimate) just to put a box on a page with Jpeg headers and footers, but ask me to create a horizontal navigation bar and I might cry, I created one once, but how I did it? who knows? I certainly haven't been able to recreate my success.

So I'm hoping that there's someone out there who will tell me they managed to master Dreamweaver, how long it took them, and maybe suggest some learning resources (don't say college as my financial Director (husband) will say "no". I've been using the iTunes U tutorials in HTML and DW, Adobe online Tutorials and the obligatory Dreamweaver for Dummies CS6.

[daffy654]

Have you tried simply typing 'dreamweaver tutorials' into Google?
I think you probably have but as you never mentioned it I thought I'd ask. I know when I was trying to learn Paint Shop Pro (many years ago now) I found the free online tutorials invaluable.

[Mosaic]

I used to agonise over Dreamweaver but I don't any more, as proprietary templates have come on in leaps and bounds. In addition, I was totally hacked off when my own bought n paid for Macromedia Studio Suite stopped functioning - apparently built-in obsolescence to ensure you have to re-invest after a mere nine years use. This wouldn't be a problem if they weren't so expensive.
So, sorry to be totally unhelpful, but I'd recommend not beating yourself up about this and going down an easier and ultimately less expensive route.
If you are seeking to gain the skill as part of your professional development, I'd say from observation that most recruiters now are looking for experience in Ruby and Python rather than Dreamweaver.

[nellypope]

Thanks Mosaic, you're right, there's much more choice out there with regards to software than I first thought. Im aiming to go down the self-employed web designer route, so I suppose its a question of finding what suits me. I was hoping that DW would be far more suited to the Graphic Designer-come-web designer, but perhaps one of these other programs would be more suitable? I will look into Ruby and Python. CSS seems so illogical!

[WyeDyed]

I'm just getting my head around DW CS6.
For menus, use Spry inserts. Cascading Style Sheets are a little daunting at first but essential in my opinion.
Here is a useful reference: http://www.w3schools.com/

[The Builder]

I don't know if it's any help, Nelly, but the w3school site that wyedyed mentions is very good.
I've been teaching myself CSS and CSS3, but outside of anything like DW. I just use "Notepad++" to write up the code and try things out.

I'm no expert by any means, but it's a good way to get an understanding of CSS, which is pretty much essential.

[bazwillrun]

Its easy when it clicks, simply put
HTML for design and most content
CSS is for styling: where it should go on the page, what size, colour, font, font size etc

Youtube has a Gazillion vids that can let you see how simple it is.

Horizontal nav bar is just an ordered list with styling so it ends up horizontal and in "boxes" , thats just one way.
eg
Home
Products
About Us

CSS would then tell it how to display eg horizontally

Home Products


You could just use Sprys or use a menu extension add-on

[nellypope]

Brilliant advice from everyone. I have bookmarked this page for all your references. Baz thanks for the advice on when and where to use HTML/CSS etc, you have confirmed what I think I thought ;-)

And thanks everyone for letting me know that its not just me that finds CSS utterly daunting, from a graphic designers point of view it's a nightmare.

Finger's crossed I will get . . . . eventually.

[nellypope]

The Builder: you are right (I think you previously advised me, on another thread, to try coding into notepad (or textedit for me) absolutely, it's been making much more sense if you can understand the HTML. Cheers!

[WyeDyed]

Hi nellypope, my reply was rushed this morning as I was supposed to be going to work. Having seen the good advice given so far, I would like to add:
When designing a web site it's always a good idea to have the Style Sheet on a separate file with a .css extension, that way you can keep the styling consistant between pages and make alterations to fonts, styling throughout the site by making one alteration to the style sheet.
You can do all this by hand coding in Notepad but Dreamweaver automates much of this and gives instant feedback on your changes
Despite it's claim that you need no knowledge of coding to use DW, I disagree. I swap between wisiwig and hand coding; when you are trying to work out why the page doesn't act as you expected the coding is the bottom line (that is what the browser is interpreting).
Finally, for now, it might be worth setting up a local server on your PC. I use WAMP (Windows Apache MySql PHP). This way you can test your pages locally but behaving as if they were live. It can be a bit of a challenge to configure but I find it really useful (it wont do PHP Mail() functions, or, at least, I can't configure it).
Good luck.
It would be nice if the techies and web designers could pool their knowledge somewhere on this site. I've put up a couple of questions in the past but it's pot luck as to weather the right people see it.

[nellypope]

Wyedeyed. Thankyou. :-) having been left banging my head against a brick wall with DW I have spent the last week working on coding in Textedit as I realised that, as you say the coding is the bottom line, and just as DW just doesnt seem to want to "play ball" with my ideas I have found myself referring back to the coding each time to try and work out where I am going wrong. Thankyou for confirming in my mind that you have to have some good grasp (at least) of HTML to be able to use DW. Yes it would be great if some of the techies could lend us a hand.

thankyou :-)

[WyeDyed]

I've subscribed to this thread so we can, at least, help one another :-)