Personalization

Before you can do anything, you must define your Web site, explaining to Dreamweaver where your files will be kept, both on your computer and on the remote server, providing account and password and path information. Once you define the Local and Remote sites, using Dreamweaver is easy, but before we even do that, let's spend a moment on little details that can make working in Dreamweaver so frustrating or so rewarding.

If a setting or a feature of Dreamweaver strikes you as counterintuitive, or inconvenient, you can probably change it. We are here to learn to use Dreamweaver, so we will only highlight a few preferences first, then grind through defining our workspace and Web site and then get into learning Dreamweaver. You may prefer other settings—Dreamweaver's defaults are often fine for many people—but here are a few that might make your journey easier.

We often deal with long lines of text. Anchor tags, or links, can use many characters describing only a few characters on your page. To maintain Source formatting, some people prefer to turn Word Wrap off, so they can quickly and easily count paragraphs, line-up list items and so on. For others, it is more important to see at a glance all the markup for a given area of a page. They will want to turn Word Wrap on. This is not a forever choice—many people toggle this on and off, as needed.

You may prefer to keep your Design View on top of your Code View in Split display. To set your Design View on Top, select the View Options icon from the top of your workspace and choose Design View on Top. There are other options, including having Design View display beside Code View, that are available via, in this case, the View menu.

Remember, too, there are dozens or hundreds of options available in the actual Preferences panels.