Hi Barry,

I created a drop down menu with Dreamweaver CS3 ( I am waiting to upgrade soon. )

Your directions were great. When I F12 the page to preview it, it looks awesome!

However, when I upload the page, does not look the way it should or function at all.

I have searched the internet high and low for answers to no avail.

Do you have any suggestions, or a quick fix?

Thank you so much for you help.

Shari

Hi Shari,

When you create a drop-down menu with the Spry features in Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver generates the HTML and CSS code, as well as the scripts that make it all work.

Those scripts are usually saved in a folder with a name like SpryAssets and you need to upload the scripts for your drop-down menu to work.

Look in the Files panel for a new folder created by Dreamweaver that has .js files in it (these are JavaScript files). Upload the entire folder to your server with the HTML page that has your drop-down menu and everything should work on the server, just like it does on your hard drive.

You can learn more on my site about creating a drop-down menu in Dreamweaver, as well as editing a drop-down menu in Dreamweaver.

Hope that helps you solve the problem,

Janine

1. Make sure you uploaded your site to the right place. On many web servers, if you use the FTP info they send, you enter the main folder on the server where they keep your email, web folder, etc, but you need to then open the web folder and upload your files into that folder. It’s often called something like htdocs, or webdocs, or it could be named the URL of your site. It depends on your server, but the key thing to know is that you need to upload the files for your new site into that folder for them to become visible at your URL.

On a related note, a good way to make sure you’re in the right folder is to look for the pages of your old site, make sure you find the main page of the site, and then replace it with the main page of the new site and all of your other files.

2. Make sure you named the main page of your site correctly. On most servers, the main page of your site should be named index.html, but some servers are set up for default.html. It’s often okay to use .html or .htm — they work the same. However, if the main page of your old site is called, say, default.htm and you upload the new version with a main page named index.html, you won’t see the new page if the server is still ‘serving’ the old default.htm page.

Whatever the main page of your old site was called, assume that’s what you should name the main page of the new site and make sure you replace the old page with the new page.

I hope that helps and I wish you all be best with your newly redesigned site.

Janine

If you choose Appearance (HTML) DW uses the HTML attributes, which are no longer recommended.

Janine

Even if you haven’t read those authors, you can quickly appreciate that Marquez was a master at magic realism, which is quite different from the science fiction and horror that Stephen King is famous for in books like Carrie and The Shining. To further complicate matters, the way many of us write CSS has changed over time. William Shakespeare is still considered a master, but few teachers would recommend you write the way he did anymore. Similarly, even well-written CSS, if it’s a few years old, may read like Old English today.

ThemeForest and Woo Themes are considered some of the better sources for templates and WordPress themes, but as soon as you find yourself reviewing someone else’s CSS, you have to take into consideration that every author has their own style, that there are many ways to create the same design effects with CSS, and that if you really want to write the cleanest, best code possible, you’ll spend hours on the details — in much the way a great writer can spend an afternoon looking for just the write word.

The more you learn about CSS, the better you’ll get at writing (and reading) it, but at the end of the day, some of the differences in style sheets come down to, well, style.

You can learn more about the basics from my CSS training videos.

Janine

I have watched all of your Dreamweaver and CSS training videos numerous times and worked all of the projects, and I am getting the hang of css styles and rules, etc.

However, I have noticed that the pre-made CSS templates in Dreamweaver have <style> in the CSS panel, which I presume is an “internal” style sheet.  You keep saying in your training that adding an “external” <style.css> to the html page is better, but where do these “external” style sheets come from?

Is there a basic external style sheet you can attach?  Can you change the internal style sheet that came with the template to an external style sheet?

Thanks,

Tom

Hi Tom,

Yes, you can change an internal style sheet into an external style sheet. Here’s what you do.

1. Create a new CSS file by choose File > New, then in the New dialog, choose Blank Page on the left, and choose CSS, and then choose Create.

2. Save that file by choose File > Save, and name it style.css, or main.css (or something like that)

3. Open the HTML page that has the internal styles (the ones that are in the <styles> tags), and attach the new blank external style sheet to that HTML page. You can do that by choosing Format > CSS Styles > Attach Stylesheet.

Now you should see the blank external style sheet in the CSS Styles panel, just above or below the list of styles in the page.

4. To move the styles into the new blank style sheet, just click and drag them in the styles panel from the internal style sheet to the external one, as you see in this screenshot.

Note, you can Shift+Click, or Cmd + Click, to select multiple styles and drag them all at once.

After you move all of the styles into the external style sheet, save the CSS file, and you can then attach that new external CSS file to any or all of the other pages in your site to apply the sames styles to every page.

If you already have internal styles on a page that are the same as the styles in the external style sheet, make sure to delete them — having duplicate styles can cause conflicts.

I hope that helps you finish your site.

Janine

I just watched your class on E-Commerce on Kelby Training.  It was an excellent class for someone like me, but  I am experiencing a little difficulty in adding the Google checkout to my site. I have no problems adding the code for the items, but that 2nd piece of code that you said to put at the bottom of every page is causing me problems. I am using iWeb and I am not quite sure where to insert that code, or if it is even possible.

Thank you in advance,

Joe 

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the kinds words about my training videos. I don’t know much about iweb specifically, but some web services — especially those that over simply web design and limit you to templates — make it difficult, or even impossible, to get to the right place in the code to use Google Checkout.

If that’s your situation, you may need to use PayPal instead. Unlike Google, which gives you a small piece of code for each button, and another small piece of code to put at the bottom of each page, when you use the shopping cart service from PayPal, you get all of that code in one big chunk. I still prefer the interface of Google Checkout, but in your case, PayPal may be your best (or only) choice.

I know many people prefer to learn with training videos, but I also have a written tutorial on how to use Google Checkout that may help you find the place you’re having trouble.

I hope that helps you find the right solution for your website and I wish you all the best with your online sales,

Janine
DigitalFamily.com

While adding pages to my site, I have been organizing them via subfolders locally on my hard drive. This results in web pages URL’s appearing long and messy. Is there a way to enter a tag, style, or code to change the display URL on my website?

Thank you for your time,
   Mike 

Hi Mike,

Think of a hosting company like an apartment you rent, a place where your web site can live.

Think of the domain name like your phone number, one that you can transfer (or forward) to a new apartment if you ever needed to do so.

Some web hosting services, such as Weebly, provide a very limited hosting service that only lets you use their templates in their system. You could think of that like getting a furnished apartment you’d rent by the week.

A custom web site created with a program like Dreamweaver or WordPress, is far too complex for a web hosting system that restricts you to the templates on their site.

Web hosting varies the way apartments do. When you sign up for web hosting at a new company like Dreamhost.com, you get a cheap apartment, but one it’s still one that you can furnish yourself. When you sign up with a company like Rackspace.com, you got a much nicer apartment, but you pay for the view (or in this case, the faster, more reliable service). These and many other web hosting services let you upload your own web site to their web server or install a wordpress blog, much like you would furnish your own apartment and hang art on the walls.

You can use the same company to register your domain name and host your web site, or you can use two different companies. If you use two different companies, then you then have to essentially transfer your domain from your domain registrar to your web host, much like you might ask the phone company to move your a phone number to your new apartment. In the case of a domain, however,  it’s usually called changing DNS. If you ever want to change the company where you registered your domain, that’s kind of like changing phone companies while keeping the same phone number and it’s a bit more complicated than just changing DNS.

For more tips on how (and where) to register a domain name, check out the article: Can Anyone Register a Domain Name?

For more tips on web hosting, check out the article: Choosing the Best Web Hosting Service.

Hope that helps,

Janine

Answer:

In any URL, caps are optional up to the .com part. Addresses are only case-sensitive after the .com (same goes for .org, .edu, and other types of URLs).

When I’m advertising a Web address or URL, I like to use caps in the URL because most web site names are easier to read that way.  I recommend:

MyDomainName.com

or for my site: DigitalFamily.com

However, if anyone types your domain in all lowercase, they’ll get there just fine. (Some publications prefer that style and will only print URLs in all lowercase, but it’s not necessary.)

Both DigitalFamily.com and digitalfamily.com will take you to the same web page, but if you have an address that extends beyond the .com part, the case does matter.

For example: DigitalFamily.com/Books and DigitalFamily.com/books are not the same address — the one with the capital B will not work.

The technical reason is that most web servers are case-sensitive and the part of the address that comes after the .com is based on the name of the folder or the filename that page resides in on the server.

For the same reason that links within a web site should match the case of the name of the file they link to, the address after the .com needs to match the case of the specific file or folder.

Think of a long URL as being one long link to a page within a site. In this example, DigitalFamily.com/books takes you directly to a page on my web server that is in a folder named “books.” This won’t work with “Books” because I didn’t use a cap when I named the folder. Most web designers use lowercase after the .com consistently so they can easily keep things the same, but if you do use mixed case on folders and filenames, you need to do the same in the URL (as you see in this next example).

I could have linked specifically to the page about my newest book, Mobile Web Design For Dummies, by using this URL: http://www.digitalfamily.com/books/mobileWebdesign/index.html.

And here’s your bonus lesson for the day

Name your main pages index.html to create shorter sub-URLs.

The URL http://www.digitalfamily.com/books

goes to this page: http://www.digitalfamily.com/books/index.html

If you name the main page in any folder index.html, you can shorten the address and just use the folder name. That makes it easier to give the URL out in print, and because most web servers are designed to “serve” the index.html page first, you can more easily set it up.

Save people typing the extra long addresses and use index pages to take people directly to subsections of your sites.

Oh, and if you have a blog, use an SEO plugin to help create clean URLs. Short URLs are better for humans and computers…