Home Page Design ? Dreamweaver

[Novicebuild]

I currently have a very basic look to my home page and want to revamp it. I am completely without talent when it comes to html etc. Is trying to use Dreamweaver a mistake? Is it very complicated for someone with zero experience? I need a decent logo and homepage essentially. Any advice greatfully received. If I use dreamweaver, which version?

[RuralWeb]

forget any thought of using dw. Better to spend the money on getting it do e by someone else who will make a better job and do it far faster. Learning to use dw will take years and remove all your hair.

[jont]

Whilst Dreamweaver has a very good WYSIWYG design mode you really need some understanding of HTML to get the best out of it with Actinic. Rather than invest in Dreamweaver you may be better advised to have the layout designed for you - probably cheaper and would look far superior. Gabe has a request service at http://www.actlance.co.uk/ to post jobs.

If you want to do it yourself the inbuilt Design Wizard would do everything a n00b to Dreamweaver could achieve in a few clicks.... DW is only good at laying the foundations and structure ... you still need to add the artistic touches in as well and these can be done inside Actinic but without the WYSIWYG interface.

[Duncan Rounding]

This is a massive topic but here's a few pointers:

Plan your site as you believe you want it to be (you can do a lot of research on this).
Sketch out a few layouts on paper of how it may look.
Create the static layouts in Photoshop (a large learning curve in itself) and 'cut' into peices to use in the html coding.
Only now are you ready to start putting the pieces together with Dreamweaver to create the html code for the layouts.

Dreamweaver is not a difficult program to use but it takes experience to be able to transform a layout on paper into html code.

Many people find it very fulfilling to do this themselves and some make a good job of it but it will take a lot of learning and time on your part. If you don't feel you're up for it then stick to the standard Actinic themes and make small modifications such as a new logo and perhaps colour scheme or get a designer to do it for you.

[Novicebuild]

Whilst Dreamweaver has a very good WYSIWYG design mode you really need some understanding of HTML to get the best out of it with Actinic. Rather than invest in Dreamweaver you may be better advised to have the layout designed for you - probably cheaper and would look far superior. Gabe has a request service at http://www.actlance.co.uk/ to post jobs.

If you want to do it yourself the inbuilt Design Wizard would do everything a n00b to Dreamweaver could achieve in a few clicks.... DW is only good at laying the foundations and structure ... you still need to add the artistic touches in as well and these can be done inside Actinic but without the WYSIWYG interface.

Thanks, I have downloaded the evaluation version of V9 to play on. Have unfortunately managed to create a coding error that I have no idea how to correct! Can I do something to revert to factory settings? My initial tast is to set a new brochure image. Sorry to be so inadequate but how big do I need to make it in order for it to slot in? Any tips are very much appreciated.

[pinbrook]

either take notes so you know what you have done so you can undo mistakes, or take snapshots so you can reimport back to the point where you had a working copy, or know which layout you were messing with before you got coding errors and reset thr layout to default.

take time to play and learn, even if you trash many attempts before building the design for real.

if you try to build to early you will end up with a load of bad code which will be a nightmare to unravel in the future.

my advice

1 go on the actinic design course
2 pay for a template from an experienced designer

[Duncan Rounding]

Go to Design|Library - Layouts tab at the bottom. You can then expand the layout to see which have been changed and revert back to default.