Chapter 20: Spry Tools

In this chapter, the use of spry tools in order to create a more interactive web page was covered. Dreamweaver has a spry group on the insert bar that allows you to work with spry data, forms and layouts. In order to really benefit from this, the designer should have a mature understanding of xml in order to set up the xml data sets for use.

This feature helps in enabling the creation of more interactive sites; however, the site that is needed by Eve for the tattoo site will be much more static in nature.

Chapter 19: Media Objects

In this chapter the essentials for inserting media objects in Dreamweaver were covered. Inserting sound links, embedding multimedia files, and inserting flash content were all covered. The main issues to worry about are whether or not the users have the plug-ins necessary to view the content you load.

This is good stuff, but will not be relevant to the site for the tattoo shop.

Chapter 18: Accessibility

This chapter went over some simple steps and guidelines that can be followed in order to ensure sites created are accessible to users. Overall, the main takeaway was to include relevant long descriptions and appropriate , entries as this is what screen-reading programs will go through. Also, in Dreamweaver the "summary:" section in the table dialog box provides a place to give a thorough description of the table contents that will only be read by screen-reading programs.

Chapter 17: Automating Tasks

This chapter introduced some of the automation features within Dreamweaver. One useful feature covered was the History Panel which allows you to select certain actions or sets of actions and have them performed on new sets of data. For instance, if you took the following three steps:

1. Selected text
2. Right aligned text
3. Bolded text

You could then, using the history panel, select the three steps that were performed, and have them performed elsewhere--say, in the next text section. Thus this tool allows the user to quickly replicate simple and repetitive tasks in order to save time.

Another feature covered in the chapter was how to use find and replace. It works very similarly to the find and replace functions in MS word, but differs in that you can select what type of text you want to search, source code, tags, etc.

Chapter 16: Templates

This chapter went through how to create templates in Dreamweaver. It helps to allow you to create a design from which to work from in order to ensure that all pages have the same formatting. If you want to make a change to the formatting, you only need to change the template and have it apply changes to all pages. Creating library items was also covered in the chapter. Library items let you store certain data pieces (such as copyright information) that you may use throughout the site and store them in a library. This way, you can update the library item without having to find all instances of that particular data (every instance of a copyright) and the changes are automatic throughout the website. The features in this chapter would be particularly useful in designing and maintaining a large and complex website.

Chapter 15: Editing Images

This chapter introduced how to edit image files in Photoshop and Fireworks. It didnt go into how to use them, but instead, covered how to open the images there and to use original files and to copy and paste images in Dreamweaver. The best part of this is the interoperability between the different programs--it makes it very easy to edit your images. Now, I need to go learn how to use Photoshop!

Chapter 14: Behaviors

This chapter covered the basics of applying behaviors in Dreamweaver. The behavior panel on the side makes it easy to apply a behavior to an element on the page and allows you to easily select the action for the behavior to be performed. Unfortunately, the list of behaviors is not fully comprehensive. Also, there is a behavior for validation but it gave you limited options: requried/notrequired, number, emailaddress, number in a range...etc. However, it doesn't have a "custom" field where you can apply custom behaviors...like, a SSN or phone. So, I guess you have to go into the code view to apply those.