Working with Web Design Templates & Themes for Dreamweaver, WordPress, Flash, and more

Using templates in Web design is a great way to save time on your page designs -- and there are a gazillian templates you can download from the Web.

But before you learn how to edit web sites with templates or themes, it's helpful to understand the big picture:

What are templates best used for, and how do templates differ for different kinds of web sites and blogs.

The term template means many things (on and off the Web), but essentially a template is a shortcut in the design process.

The idea is that once you get a page looking the way you like, you turn it into a template so you can use it to create additional pages faster and easier.

With WordPress Themes and Dreamweaver Templates, you can create new pages more quickly, and you can make global changes across many pages created automatically.

What gets tricky on the Web is that not all templates are created equally and you can't open every template in just any program -- it has to be the right program.

There are many different kinds of templates -- Dreamweaver Templates, WordPress Themes, Templates for Adobe Flash and Photoshop.

If you download a Flash template, you can't edit it in Dreamweaver (Learn how to use Dreamweaver to insert Flash videos and animations into a Web page).

Similarly, you can’t even view a WordPress template effectively in Dreamweaver unless you set up a local server and install WordPress. You can edit WordPress themes in Dreamweaver, but working on blog templates is more complex than creating Dreamweaver templates for HTML pages.

When you create a site completely in Adobe Dreamweaver, you can create the pages on your personal computer and then publish them to a web server when you're ready to share them with the world.

That's why you have to set up a site in Dreamweaver before you work on it -- so you can manage two copies of your site -- one on your computer, one on the server.

In contrast, many WordPress blogs are created, designed, and updated entirely on a web server. You don't have to have a copy of WordPress on your personal computer to add new posts or edit a blog.

Using any web browser (Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome) you can set up and manage a WordPress blog from any computer with an Internet connection. You can download and change the design with themes you can find online, and use a browser to access all the tools you need to add and edit posts, as well as change styles, widgets, and a growing list of plugins, which add special features like slideshows, registration forms, and more.

With WordPress you don't have to buy or install software on your computer, but you will have more options for designing and editing CSS and themes in Dreamweaver if you want to take the extra effort to set up all the software on your computer.

Once you install WordPress and Dreamweaver on your computer, you can create and Wordpress themes in Dreamweaver and then you can upload those pages to a web server when you're done. (Lean how to set up your computer as a web server and install WordPress and Dreamweaver to edit templates.)

Editing WordPress Blogs with Dreamweaver (the easy way)

If you just want to use Dreamweaver to supplement what you can do with WordPress, there is an easier way to edit posts, style sheets, and more (you don't have to turn your personal computer into a web server to use Dreamweaver to edit your blog).

Thanks to copy and paste (one of the oldest tricks on the Web), you can work work on parts of your blog on your personal computer without having a copy of the entire blog on your hard drive.

You can copy just the text and HTML you want for a post from one program to another (I keep Dreamweaver and a Web browser or two open simultaneously on my computer and move from one to another).

You can edit and add style sheets from your personal computer to a WordPress blog online, you can use Dreamweaver to create or edit a post and then copy it into post field in the Wordpress Dashboard. With this hybrid approach, you get the best of both programs without all of the setup.

Dreamweaver has many great formatting tools for writing, editing, and troubleshooting HTML and CSS -- far more than the row of basic formatting choices in the WordPress admin tool. Dreamweaver is especially helpful when it comes to just changing the colors, fonts, and other formatting features in your blog, but you do have to be careful when you copy a CSS file from a WordPress blog into Dreamweaver or vice versa. (Learn more about how to use Dreamweaver to edit WordPress blogs.)

So many Dreamweaver template options

Dreamweaver supports many kinds of technologies, as well as the templates that go with each. When you create new pages in Dreamweaver by choosing File -->New, you have the option of create a blank page or a blank template, as shown in this figure.

When you create a simple HTML template, Dreamweaver uses the .dwt extension (see the nearby Dreamweaver Templates section in this chapter).
Dreamweaver also supports Microsoft ASP and ASP.NET, and you can create templates using ASP JavaScript or ASP VBScript (which use the .asp extension) or ASP.NET C#  and VB (which use the .aspx extension).

The templates for a site created using Java end in .jsp. And if you use Adobe’s ColdFusion technology, your templates end in .cfm.

The big lesson is this: Make sure you have the right kind of template for the kind of site you’re creating and rest assured that Dreamweaver supports just about any kind of technology you can use to create a Web site today.

 

 

 

 

 

Contact | Terms & Conditions of Use | Privacy Policy | Site Map

Copyright 2001 to 2012. All rights reserved. DigitalFamily.com is owned and operated by Artesian Media, Inc.