History and Context

If you are new to Web page markup, HTML and and all the rest can seem awfully daunting. Adobe Dreamweaver can help.

Years ago, Dreamweaver let you highlight text, then choose HTML tags from a menu of options. You could make selected text a heading or a paragraph by clicking the proper drop-down selection, or make it a link by clicking a button and filling in a tiny form. That was great, for the time, but it was also pretty much it. Over the years, Dreamweaver has evolved under constant revision and today is the market leading Web page editor.

Today, Dreamweaver is available in feature–equivalent versions for both Macintosh and Windows PCs. It handles files and other resources throughout your Web site, keeping track of stylesheets, JavaScripts, Templates, navigation and page footers and can even remember your favorite colors, graphics and even entire blocks of recurring text or markup. Dreamweaver includes wizards to help simplify complicated tasks. Using Flash and Photoshop has been much better integrated, too.

Using Dreamweaver, it is possible to build Web sites without any knowledge of HTML. It's not a good idea, but it is possible. As you grow with Dreamweaver, you will find features you use often, some you rarely use and probably some you will never use. That's one of the strengths of Dreamweaver: You can choose as much or as little as you want to learn, and let the program do the rest for you. But the more you know about both Dreamweaver and HTML, the better, faster and more confident you will be.

You can get Dreamweaver help all over. Student workers pick it up quickly and easily, if they don't already know it. And you can always bring your questions and concerns to the UNL Web Developers Network.