Starting brand new on DreamWeaver with questions.

[JMobile]

I wanna start making a website and start off by basic form.

I'm also going to use a free CSS template for now.

I guess my first question is, once I learn how to make my own template for my desire, can I replace the new template with the old one once my website

has already been running online?

 

I also wanna add music, videos, jpegs and gifs. Is this all possible?

But I wanna add music to play once they start visiting my page and a video to be part of my site and not just streamed from Youtube, know what I mean?

For Dreamweaver, is this all possible?

I wanna use DW because I just got the program so might as well use it.

 

Thanks guys!

[grabenair]

This sounds like a big project. You will need more then DW to get this done. DW is used for writing code. You will need photoshop or fireworks for img editing. There are free ones out there though. For videos you will have to have another program. I use Flash to turn my videos into an swf file format for web use. Good luck and you came to the right place for help and advice there are a lot of great people here to help you along.

[JMobile]

I've seen some youtube tutorials on how to add a video. And I guess that I can convert all my video files to flash files and I would be okay, is that correct?

Or do I still need something else besides DW?

[grabenair]

I have not done that much with videos on any of my sites, just once so I am not much help there. But for the img you need to have them sized for the web, a very good tool for this that is free at fotozier.com This program does a lot and not to bad of job at resizing imgs. It lets you do one or a hole folder at once. Has maintain aspect ratio. It is not any way as good as photoshop but if you are happy with you imgs the this free tool is perfect.

Edited July 6, 2011 by grabenair

[JMobile]

What about animated gifs?

I'm sure there is a difference with gifs and regular images(jpeg)

[falkencreative]

What about animated gifs?

I'm sure there is a difference with gifs and regular images(jpeg)

Image files (.jpg, .gif, .png) are all inserted in the same way by using an <img> tag.

 

One thing to keep in mind... Dreamweaver won't magically make you a web designer. You still need to understand the coding that's involved in making web pages. Having Dreamweaver do all the coding for you is just asking for trouble, since you'll often run into issues (especially cross-browser issues) that you can't fix without knowing the coding that creates your web pages.

[JMobile]

So me starting off with a free CSS template is a start?

I've seen a lot of youtube tutorials so it looks basic which is okay for me right now as I just wanna start from bottom to top.

[grabenair]

Trust in Ben he is an awesome dude. Like he said DW is just an fancy text editor. You can theoretically build a web site with DW with out knowing code. But I would not advize this, I tried it and did not go very well. Like Ben said when things go wrong you will have problems if you do not know any code. Advice go on this form and find the article that LSW wrote about learning code, anyway I think it was him if not somebody correct me please. It is has a lot of good stuff in it about why you should learn code. Just remember in web designing there is not really any good short cuts.

Edited July 7, 2011 by grabenair