Aboard No Boundaries
June 22, 2009
When we decided that we wanted to have a website for keeping in touch with family and friends, we had little real experience to understand what it meant to have a website. We are learning.
Our best friend in website development is Adobe Dreamweaver. Several years ago I received a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver which I dearly loved, and it was the tool with which we crafted our website initially. However, web design, like all other technical realms, changes over time, and we found ourselves needing an upgrade. Recently we purchased the Adobe CS4 suite, which includes an upgraded version of Dreamweaver as well as Photoshop and many other wonderful Adobe tools.
Dreamweaver is a wonderful product, but it is so versatile that the learning curve is quite steep. The big change from the older version of Dreamweaver was to move from building pages with frames to building pages with CSS – stylesheets. I had a hard time at first, because frames gave me a more visual reference during the design phase. However, the more I learn about CSS, the more I like it.
What this means for you is that our website will always be in a transitional state. Every time I learn a new trick, I can’t wait to try it out. For the latest website update, I reworked all the new slideshows. I was motivated to do that by the ugly appearance of the slideshows produced by Dreamweaver’s command that builds them automatically. I loved the fact that I could create a collection of photos, then issue the command and have a slideshow in less than five minutes. I hated the way the show looked – the font, the color of the text, the listing of file names and so forth.
Until the past week, I had not taken the time to pull the slideshow apart to figure out how it worked. After I did that, I realized that with a template and a stylesheet I could repair/rework that ugly slideshow and make it better. I’m still a novice at templates and stylesheets, so my first projects are still fairly crude, but they will get better. I hope you will like the new and improved versions. As always, I am open to suggestions for improvement or requests for any specific information or presentation.
We really do want to share our adventure with you. We hope you enjoy the trip. Keep talking and let us know what we can do better.