Dear Janine,

I am a new secretary at a new church and currently we do not have an office, so we are not connected to the Internet. I am looking at Dreamweaver so we are able to create our own web page but I am not sure how to then get the page up on the net? Do we need a web host? Can you recommend any? I would greatly appreciate any information you can share with me on this matter!!!!

My sincere thanks!!!
Terri

Hi, Terri,

You will need a host to publish your site online. You’ll find a couple of hosts listed in the tutorial about domain names on my site. Both companies I mention are well respected and provide reasonably priced hosting as well as domain registration.

You’ll find the article at: http://www.digitalfamily.com/dreamweaver/domain-names.html

I hope that helps and I wish you all the best,
Janine

Still want more? Visit the Dreamweaver Help Center at www.DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver to find Dreamweaver tips, tricks, and tutorials.

Hi Janine

I am a devout follower of your Dreamweaver training DVDs.  Thanks for making such a great product.  I am having a problem with Dreamweaver’s FTP function and was hoping you had some insight

I have been using DW8 for over a year now and use the built-in FTP tool to upload all changes to the sites I manage.  Recently however I have not been able to connect to two of my sites when I try to connect to the remote site.  The error is a Macromedia Dreamweaver error that states, “An FTP error occurred - cannot make connection to host. Your login or password is incorrect.  Please check your connection information.”

Keep in mind that I have been connecting problem-free to these two sites for months, then all of a sudden I get this message.  I also have a third site that I can still connect with no problem.  I contacted Adobe but they told me to use the online help to troubleshoot my connectivity problem.  Needless to say, I still have the problem.

I hope you have heard of other users encountering this phenomenon and have some helpful suggestions for resolution.

Best Regards,
Matt

Hi Matt,

There are many possible reasons for your problem, but if you’ve connected before with Dreamweaver and you haven’t changed the settings in Dreamweaver, you probably have a problem caused by changes to your Internet connection or your Web server. Sometimes selecting the Passive FTP option in the remote site settings solves this problem. You may also want to check with your service provider.

When all else fails, you may also want to consider trying a dedicated FTP program, such as WS_FTP or CuteFTP, both of which are similar to the FTP features in Dreamweaver but sometimes get around problems such as you describe. I always keep a couple of FTP options on my machine because it can help with troubleshooting.

I hope that helps and I wish you all the best,
Janine

Still want more? Visit the Dreamweaver Help Center at www.DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver to find Dreamweaver tips, tricks, and tutorials.

Janine –

I bought Dreamweaver CS3 last fall and struggled learning it to develop a website for my new business.  It’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, but I stuck with it.  I have so much yet to learn as this is all new to me.  I included prices, images, descriptions, etc., and figured it would all link to a shopping cart, as I was advised this was the program I should learn.  I prepared an Excel spreadsheet with all the above information and customer would enter only quantity when ordering and the rest would be done for them.  I found out I could not link this to a credit card system.

Because of time limitations, I hired a designer firm to do the shopping cart and integrate it into my Dreamweaver program.  I asked that the codes be entered in my program as I wanted to control my site as I continued to improve my limited skills in Dreamweaver.  Perhaps if you saw my site and the shopping cart which was designed for me, that will provide you with a better understanding of what I’m talking about.  My site is www.techtrees.net and the start of my shopping cart is www.techtrees.net/shop.

First of all, I realized that the designers created a more professional site than mine, but given time, I will make improvements on mine.  (How else will I ever learn?)  The concerns I expressed to them were:

1.  It appears that I have 2 separate sites, as the trees are not listed on the side for the shopping cart - not that it has to, but in my view, designer  created a different format/style.

2.  I’m concerned about ease of navigation for customers from my site to the shopping cart.

3.  Designer did not build in formulas for different prices.

4.  Was told they would integrate in Dreamweaver and they did not - I asked designer why they did not do this and was told it could corrupt my Dreamweaver.  (It appears that they used oscommerce shopping cart - php?)

Now the designer wants to re-create my entire site with a shopping cart and all for an additional fee and my husband says no!

Since I don’t know much about all the above, I searched the web to find out if Dreamweaver has a shopping cart.  It appears there are templates.  Then I stumbled on your forum where someone asked a similar question about integrating a shopping cart.  My questions to you:

1.  Can a shopping cart be integrated into my existing website?  (I’d like the customer to click on a link to a tree where they would find the prices and where it says, Buy now, they would click to a shopping cart.)

2.  If #1 cannot be done, I don’t mind, I guess, going to another location for a shopping cart, but I don’t want to send the customer off to another site that looks quite different.

3.  Will php corrupt my site if integrated?

Janine, I know I’ve talked a lot here and I know you are an extremely busy person.  If you can advise me in any way I would be most appreciative.  I would like to continue to improve my skills with Dreamweaver and use the program for my small business website, but perhaps this is not the way to go.  I don’t wish to continue investing more money and time into tutorials and such if I turn my website over to designers whom I have to rely on.

If the above is too much for you to answer/respond, would you please just email me and let me know that you do not have the time to answer my questions?

Thank you!
Margaret

Hi Margaret,

I try to answer all the questions I get by email, but I’m off to visit family and have been rushing to make a deadline in preparation for the trip.

Here are a few responses for now:

1. I’m so sorry you hired designers that have disappointed you. It can be very hard to clearly communicate what you want, especially when you are still learning. That’s just to reassure you that you are not the first to have such problems and not to feel so badly about it. (I’m sure it doesn’t feel good, but I can assure you from what you’re saying that it’s not all your fault in any way).

2. I can’t imagine how oscommerce could “corrupt” Dreamweaver, although it would probably be easy to break some of the code from the commerce system if you edit those pages in Dreamweaver. You’d have to be very careful not to alter the code for the shopping cart features, but in theory, you could edit the template pages in Dreamweaver.

3. Depending on how the template pages were created, it could be tricky, so make sure you create a copy of your site so you can go back to the original pages if you need to.

4. Although Dreamweaver is capable of creating almost anything, your question is beyond the scope of what I teach in Dreamweaver. eCommerce is not a specific feature of Dreamweaver, and although you can create custom shopping cart systems, you have to you have very advanced programming skills to do so.

5. For that reason, most people don’t create custom shopping carts in Dreamweaver (unless they are running very large sites). Instead, they create a custom site like yours and then link to a third-party shopping system.

I don’t know much about the system you say your designers used, but most work similarly. The best ones make it very easy to add products, prices, etc. but nearly all of them can be complex to customize when it comes to design.

Thus, you’ve run into a common challenge —  it’s hard to make it all feel like one consistent site.

Some shopping carts are more customizable than others, and some systems are really easy to set up.

If you don’t want to invest more money with designers who have already disappointed you, you might want to consider trying a simpler system such as  Google Store or Yahoo Store. For a more advanced option that is designed to work with Dreamweaver, consider www.WebAssist.com.

I hope that helps and I wish you all the best,
Janine

Still want more? Visit the Dreamweaver Help Center at www.DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver to find Dreamweaver tips, tricks, and tutorials.

Janine,

I am enjoying the course very much, being a newbe to web design it makes my head spin a bit though. In lesson 7 part 1 there is a file Leaves - paintings2 , when I open it to follow along the css styles are not active and the site just shows up as if in firefox with no styles, is there a file I can download so I have the same file you are teaching with?

Christopher S.

Hi Chris,

Thank you for buying watching my video tutorial on Dreamweaver. I’m sorry to learn you’re having trouble with one of the project files.

Sometimes external style sheets lose their functionality when you open pages on a different computer than the one they were created on. This shouldn’t happen, but I’ve seen it often enough to believe it’s likely the cause of your problem.

Here’s a way you may be able to fix it:

1. Open the page in Dreamweaver and make sure to note the name of the style sheet that is attached to the page — if what I suspect is happening, you’ll see the name listed in the CSS Styles panel, but you won’t be able to open it to see the styles.

2. If that is the case, click to select the name and press the Delete or Backspace key on your keyboard to delete it.

3. Click on the Attach Style Sheet button at the bottom of the CSS Styles panel.

4. Locate the style sheet in the CSS folder of the main web site folder, select it, and click OK to reattach it to the page.

That should reattach the style sheet, apply all of the styles to the page automatically, and list them in the CSS Styles panel.

I hope that solves your problem, but please feel free to email again if you continue to have any trouble with those files.

Thanks,
Janine

Still want more? Visit the Dreamweaver Help Center at www.DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver to find Dreamweaver tips, tricks, and tutorials.

Hi Janine,

Well, I guess the more you suffer and make mistakes, the more you learn.. I’ve had a fun 4th holiday getting introduced to Spry. On the good side, my site looks lightyears better than before. I can actually look at the code and understand it.

“Please” let me run one question by you regarding the Spry horizontal menu bars.Touchtunes uses a placed image for its menu bar items and a separate hover state image. The submenus are a solid light grey box and the hover state is an orange bar. My problem is that any top-row item that has a submenu below it also gets assigned the submenu class. That only allows me (3) states: 1. for the HorizontalItemBar, 2. HorizontalItemBar hover, and 3. Submenu. I can’t do a hover for the submenu if I can’t reassign some of the top-row items as HorizontalItemBars.

All I’m looking for from you is to let me know that it should work and that I’m doing something wrong with the CSS styles. If I’m doing something wrong, I’ll kill myself to eventually figure it out.

Thank you,
Chris B.

Hi Chris,

If you want to have more control over these kinds of menus, consider getting one of the Dreamweaver extensions for creating menus. You’ll find instructions and a link to the site at http://digitalfamily.com/dreamweaver/tutorial-add-extensions.html

If you search the Adobe Exchange site I referred to in the tutorial, you’ll find more menu-creation tools that may help you with more options.

The other option is to learn to write CSS and JavaScript yourself, but that’s definitely the long road home. . .

All my best,
Janine

Still want more? Visit the Dreamweaver Help Center at www.DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver to find Dreamweaver tips, tricks, and tutorials.

Dear Janine,

A few weeks back you were kind enough to take the time to respond to a few questions regarding Dreamweaver, so I thought I would try again with another couple of questions. I’ve been pulling my hair out “all” weekend trying to create similar elements to a website my client likes. I can’t seem to figure out how to do them with CSS.

On the site (www.touchtunes.com) I would like to create a similar navigation bar with drop-down submenus similar to what they have (without using AP divs). Does this look like something that was created in Flash? I copied the code from the page and opened it in Dreamweaver. It looks like it was done in Dreamweaver, but most of the format seems to be from external style sheets.

On a linked page from that same site, I would like to create similar rollover links. In the past I’ve done this by creating an initial image and rollover image in Photoshop, but I’m trying to do these by using “unordered lists.” I can change the text color easily enough, as you showed from the TT videos, but I can’t seem to figure out how to change the background color like they’ve done.

I certainly don’t want to take too much of you time. If either of these questions are covered in the advanced Total Training videos, please let me know. I learned quite a bit with your Essentials discs.

If there are any keywords or topics in the Dreamweaver manual that you could suggest, that would be great too. Thank you so much for your time. Any direction would be greatly appreciated.

Chris

Hi Chris,

You can create a drop-down menu like the one at Touchtunes by using the Spry menu features in Dreamweaver. You could also create something like this in Flash, but most sites that have menus like these use AJAX, which is what Dreamweaver uses when you use the Spry menu. You’ll find this feature covered at the end of my Advanced Dreamweaver CS4 training video and you’ll find a free written tutorial on this feature on my site at www.DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver.

As for changing the background color when you set up links with a UL tag, add a Background category setting (using the New CSS Rules dialog) to your a:link and a:hover styles and you should be able to control the background color in your rollover.

All my best,
Janine

Still want more? Visit the Dreamweaver Help Center at www.DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver to find Dreamweaver tips, tricks, and tutorials.

Hi Janine

I’ve followed all the instructions in your book (and the DVD) for uploading a database with Dreamweaver 8 as I need to put user authorization on my site, but the mdb file won’t upload to my server. I’ve tried using the database I downloaded from the Digital Family site, but no luck so far! Do you have any answer for this?

I love your DVD training and have found it invaluable in creating my site. I would hugely appreciate any help you can give me with the database upload.

Many thanks,
Lois

Hi Lois,

I wish I could help you more, but the answer to your questions depends on how your Web server manages databases and the dynamic technologies needed to connect them to your Web site. Unfortunately, not all servers support all technologies, and not all servers support all database options the same way. You also may be running into limitations because where you upload your database and other files on your server can also be important. If your server does support all of the technologies you’re using, you may simply need to make a few adjustments to make sure your connection string works on the server, which may be set up differently from how your site is set up on your hard drive.

Ultimately, these are all questions for your Web host. How you take care of these final steps is completely dependent on your Web server.

I hope that helps and I wish you all the best,
Janine

Still want more? Visit the Dreamweaver Help Center at www.DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver to find Dreamweaver tips, tricks, and tutorials.

Hi Janine

I am very new to websites and designing and liked the vertical lines (divider image) you have separating the THREE sections on your HOME page (i.e. between the books section then videos etc). I am trying to figure out how to specifically do this as I too wanted to construct 3 sections like this and have an actual divide line separating them.

I am only just getting my head around divs and CSS and have access online to Total Training videos…. Would you kindly point me in the right direction in letting me know how to go about duplicating similar effects of this layout and have the dividing line….. be much appreciated.

Regards
Tanya

Hi Tanya,

Creating the vertical lines between the three columns on my site is easier than you might imagine. Here’s the trick: To create the lines, I used the CSS border option, but I created a border that would only display on one side of two of the three divs. So, on the div on the far left, I created a border that only displays on the right side, and on the div that is at the far right, I added a border only to the left. Using the Border category of the CSS Rules dialog in Dreamweaver, you can easily specify if a border should display on any or all four sides of a div. You can also control how thick the border is and what color it is.

I hope that helps you with your vertical lines,
Janine

Still want more? Visit the Dreamweaver Help Center at www.DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver to find Dreamweaver tips, tricks, and tutorials.

Hi Janine,

I am just trying to finish up the shopping cart portion of my very first e-commerce site. I have the entire site done –- with the exception of trying to integrate the product pages with the shopping cart. I remember from your Total Training lessons, where you discuss Robin Eschner’s site, you discuss using the “drop-down” menus for situations like this. Some of the products come in various sizes so I created drop-down menus for the sizes. I’ve also placed an image button titled “add to cart” in the same table ttcell as the little drop-down menu.

Here’s where I’m getting stuck… How do I set it up so that once the shopper selects a size from the menu and clicks the “add to cart” button, that item is added to the cart? (How does the “add to cart” button know which size they chose???) I’ve played around with the item labels and values but can’t figure out how to do it!!

Can you help?

Thanks Janine,
Randy

Hi Randy,

Creating a shopping cart is one of the most complex things you can do with Dreamweaver and there are so many ways to set one up that it would be impossible for me to diagnose your problem via email. How you create the functionality you want depends on many variables, including what technology you are using to create the interactive functionality (PHP, JSP, ASP, or something similar).

If you’re relatively new to Web design, my best advice to you is to use one of the existing shopping cart systems already out there.

Because shopping carts are so complex to create, most people (unless they work at a huge company such as Amazon or have VERY advanced programming skills) wouldn’t build their own shopping cart system. Instead, they’d use one of the many existing ones you can buy or rent from a variety of companies, including Amazon and Google.

Those systems generally work like this: You sign up with a company that has a shopping system, customize the pages on their system to look more like your site (some allow more customization than others), and upload your own images and enter your own text for your products or whatever you want to sell. Then when visitors to your site are buying things, they’ll be using this third-party system, usually without even realizing it. Of course you also enter your own banking and other information so that when someone does buy something, their money is automatically deposited in your account.

There are costs involved with most of these systems because they are so complex to build and maintain, but many of them include everything you need, even credit card processing. Usually you pay an initial set-up fee and then a monthly fee or a percentage of each transaction, or some combination of these.

I suggest you read through the descriptions on the Web sites of a few of these services to find the one that might best meet your needs. Here are a few to consider:
Google Store http://www.googlestore.com/
Webstore by Amazon http://webstore.amazon.com/Online-Store-FAQ/
Yahoo Store http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/

There are also a number of systems you can buy and install on your own server, such as http://www.cartweaver.com/ and the eCart at http://www.webassist.com/, but these involve more work and the details can get complicated if you’re not a programmer.

I hope that helps you find the right solution and I wish you all the best with your Web site,

Janine

Still want more? Visit the Dreamweaver Help Center at www.DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver to find Dreamweaver tips, tricks, and tutorials.

Dear Madame Janine,

I have enjoyed your teaching in Total Training for Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Essentials. There is one thing I could not find any solutions for, namely links without any colored line or box. I changed the color to white in Page Properties and told Dreamweaver not to make any colored lines.

Nice-looking graphics do not look so nice with a colored border.

Warm regards
Seppo, Finland

Hi Seppo,

There is a very easy solution to your problem. All you need to do is set the border for your images to 0.

You can do this in two ways. The simplest is to select an image in the workspace and then enter a 0 in the Border field in the Property inspector at the bottom of the screen.

If you prefer, you can create a style for the img tag and set the border in the style to None. That will remove the border from all of your images at once.

I wish you all the best with your site,
Janine

Still want more? Visit the Dreamweaver Help Center at www.DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver to find Dreamweaver tips, tricks, and tutorials.