The first place we need to start on building your website is getting a background and getting some text.

To get a background, do the following:

1)Open Dreamweaver
2)Goto Modify
3)Goto Page Properties

If you want a background image you need to hit the "Browse" button and find the image that you would like to insert as a background. The background image needs to be placed in the same directory as your webpage. As you can see there are several options here, including options to change the color and font of the text.

Tables

Tables are useful, because you can insert text or images, and depending on the size of the monitor that you are viewing it will resize it to a specified percent. To have the table resize into a specific percent, slect the properties of the table, then specify "75" percent, this will fit nicely on almost all resolutions. In conclusion on the topic of tables, it is advisable to insert text and images inside a table. Always use tables in percent form, especially if you want your website to look normal when people are viewing it on 800x600 resolution.

To insert a table, click on the "Insert" button at the top of the screen. It is recommended that you have to no border, to do this just put 0 in the border box. To create a border type 1 in that box, or a higher number depending on how thick and bold you want your border. You may change the color of the border by clicking on the properties of the border, and selecting a specific color.

Links

It is strongly recommended that you make your links a site root, because that way no matter what happens it can still send and receive information. If you make it a document then it can lose information if the files are not in the same location.

Link

It is always nice for your "html" folder to be nicely organized, this way everything is not thrown together at the last minute. If you are going to organize the "html" folder there should be no spaces in between the folder names, when you put a folder name with a space in between, then you get a website name like www.aptoshs.net/~username/new%20folder%20/file.htm

For inserting images into a template, chose document in the "Relative To:" and then insert the image, if you chose site root then your image will not be presented.

Saving your work

The only way you can save your first webpage, the one that you will view when you click on your name, is "index" and it has to be all lower case letters. Save it in your "html" folder, located in your "U" drive.

Note: It is nice to save documents as ".htm" or ".html", this allows for less problomatic viewing.