Dreamweaver and MS Word
Learning web design with Dreamweaver based on MS Word knowledge and perspective
If you’re in marketing, I’m pretty sure that you’re very familiar with MS Word. Believe it or not, your MS Word knowledge will make it easier for you to understand web design and even create web pages with Dreamweaver. Hopefully, this article will help you gain some fundamental understanding about web design and web design with Dreamweaver.
Notes: Although I mentioned MS Word and web design in the same sentence, plus you can even save a document as a web page with MS Word, I NEVER mean for you to use Word to create/edit web pages. In fact, you should never use Word in any web creating or editing activity. Also, this article touches on the process of building website based on using table layout, which may not be the best practices in terms of current web standard.
Web design, MS Word & Dreamweaver
- A web page is basically an HTML [HyperText Markup Language] file. Like .doc indicating a [Word] document file, .pdf indicating a PDF file, .html is the file extension of a web file/page. You need MS Word to view/edit a .doc file, and a PDF reader to view a .pdf file; similarly, you need a web browser like Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari… to view an .html file.
- Although a web page is basically an HTML file, many times you see URLs and web pages with .php, .asp, .aspx, or .js… extensions. This is because HTML may be the backbone language of web design, it’s not the only language. You can use other languages to create a web page such as PHP, ASP, JS… to name a few. However, even if you’re using other languages to build web pages, HTML will still be used to some extent.
- To create a web page in general or a .html file/page in particular, you don’t need to have any special software. All you need is a text editor like Notepad, which comes installed on most if not all computers today. A basic text editor like Notepad is enough, but as always you can find myriad tools that can better facilitate your web design process like the free Notepad++ with syntax highlighting capability, or MS FrontPage, Adobe Golive, or Adobe Dreamweaver. The last 3 softwares mentioned are also referred to as WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get], emphasizing the software capability to let you see the final output website within the software user interface.
- Again, MS Word can create .html file, but it should never be used to create web pages including HTML emails. If you’re using MS Word to edit HTML emails or web pages, and it’s served you well, then it’s ok, but it’s just not a good practice.
Dreamweaver and Text Editor
Web pages can be created with a text editor; however, to do that, you’ll need to know how to [hand] code HTML. This is where softwares like Dreamweaver come in. With Dreamweaver, you can create web page without having to know HTML, but it’s always better to know at least the basics of HTML.
Let’s look at an example of a simple HTML page. If you’re doing it with the Designer View of Dreamweaver , all you need to do is to insert a table, split/merge cells and type in the content. Dreamweaver will do all the coding in the background, and you’ll see the final results as in the right column below. However, if you’re using an external text editor or the Code View of Dreamweaver and hand-coding the example, you’ll need to know HTML and have to type in all content on the left column below starting with the <HTML> tag and ending with the </HTML> tag.
| TEXT EDITOR VIEW | DREAMWEAVER VIEW |
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Dreamweaver and MS Word
As you may have seen, generally websites have either vertical or horizontal navigation or both, and websites can be built by using a table structure. Each item of the navigation can be placed inside a table cell, and the rest of the content can be in merged/split cells. If the page structure / layout is complex enough, you can even use a table inside another table to keep your content in place – also known as the nested table method.
The keyword here is table because both MS Word and Dreamweaver allow you to insert table and even insert table inside another table. If you’re familiar with table in MS Word, you’ll be as familiar with table in Dreamweaver; thus, you’ll probably know your way to structure a web page using table.
You also need images and hyperlinks in a web page, and both MS Word and Dreamweaver let you insert those into the page. The main point of this article is that Dreamweaver is pretty easy to understand; the way it works is like MS Word where you just use the menu to insert table, insert images, insert hyperlink, change font properties, and so on.
| MS WORD MENU | DREAMWEAVER MENU |
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There’re many more similarities between the interface and functionality of the two softwares. If you’re pretty proficient in using MS Word to build page layout like flyers or marketing template, then learning and using Dreamweaver to build web pages is not very far from your reach.
Again, hope it’s useful!
Related article: Dreamweaver advantages
4 Responses to 'Dreamweaver and MS Word'
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Matt Chensen
23 Mar 09 at 6:31 pm
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Very interesting to know that building a new page by myself is doable. Your post comes out at a very good time when I’m exploring the options of building a website for my flower arrangement business.
Thanks!
Kelly Zimmerman
25 Mar 09 at 11:38 pm
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Great posts specifically for business and non-technical people. I’ve recently tasked with maintaining some web page, some of your posts actually helped me a lot.
Pat
17 Apr 09 at 7:41 pm
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Glad to know you see it’s helpful!
For web design, maintenance, I’ll have a series of posts, staring with talking about CMS. The link is here:
http://visibleranking.com/2009/03/diy_website_maintenance_p1.php17 Apr 09 at 7:44 pm
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This post is perhaps both good and bad. Sorry!
It’s bad in a sense that it doesn’t cover much about web design [with Dreamweaver]. Reading through the whole article, you’ll know that Dreamweaver will let you insert table, images, links… but how you’re going to build a whole web page with this info.
On the other hand, the post is good because it may help marketing people who are not web savvy don’t feel scared to learn a new tool - Dreamweaver - to do web design and maintenance themselves.