Getting Started

In order to follow the steps in this tutorial, you must install Dreamweaver 8 and download the farm.zip sample file from this tutorial’s introductory page.

Exploring the Template Website

Download the farm_fl8 (ZIP, 13.6MB) sample file if you haven’t done so already and extract the contents to a new folder on your desktop called farmsite. The ZIP file contains an entire Dreamweaver template website, including Flash Video (FLV) files.

The website template that you use for the following exercises has a distinct farm theme. The farm site consists of nine main folders, seven templates, a few dozen static HTML pages, and a cascading style sheet (see Figure 1). The purpose of the website is to display images and videos for six common farm animals. Each animal has its own sub-folder where you store HTML pages specific to that animal. For example, you store pages that display images or videos that relate to chickens in the chickens folder. You use the last three folders (called images, videos, and Templates) to organize the images, videos, and templates for the farm site.

Figure 1. The farm website uses an intuitive folder structure.

The site has a basic three-column design, where the left column contains the main site navigation, and the middle column displays content (text, images, and video). You nest templates in the right column to display thumbnail images for both videos and static images of animals (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. The page layout is simple and contains thumbnails for the video you embed later on.

Using nested templates enables you to add new pages easily to the site and automatically have the subnavigation added for you. Also, making changes to the animal-specific templates causes the changes to cascade to any file using that template. So if you need to modify the sub-navigation within the chicken template, all files based on that template are updated automatically.