Quickly Generate Simple Styles and Build Upon Them

This may be how some developers accidentally use Dreamweaver 8 at first. Although the style attributes you can define within the Property inspector are limited, it is easy enough to add attributes to existing selectors. And, let’s face it: it sure is handy.

Determine the Overall Appearance of the Page

1. With the CSS test site active, create a new HTML file. Again, this is easy to do from the Start Page if that is in your Dreamweaver window display, but you can also choose File > New; then from the Basic page category, select HTML. Click Create.
2. Save the file into the CSS test site as csstest.htm.
3. In the Property inspector, click the Page Properties button to open the Page Properties dialog box. The Appearance category appears by default.

4. Specify the following settings:

• Page font: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
• Size: 10 pixels
• Text color: #333333
• Left Margin, Right Margin, Top Margin, Bottom Margin: 0 pixels
5. Click OK.
6. Switch to Code view and look in the head region of csstest.htm. The CSS code is efficiently written (and note that the TD and TH tags are included with the body tag to receive the appearance stylings).
7. Switch back to Design view.