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Converting the Page to a Dreamweaver Template
To develop the rest of the Web pages for the Jade Valley Web site, you could open a new page and start designing. In the long run, however, this is not the most efficient way to proceed. It's much more effective to create a template that includes the page layout, navigation bar, attached CSS styles, the accessibility feature, and the footer.
Setting up templates has three distinct advantages:
Templates decrease authoring time
They help ensure design consistency across pages
They enable you to easily update multiple pages
In creating a page template, you spare yourself the redundant task of reconstructing the basic and common page elements every time you want to create a new page. In addition, an238 document that is created based on the template remains associated to that template (although you can disassociate, or "detach," a document from its template). If you modify the template, you can instantaneously update all the documents based on that template to reflect your changes.
In Dreamweaver, you can create a template based on an existing document, or you can develop a template from a new, blank document. After the template is created, you can specify different template regions that can be modified by the template users.
In the final two tasks of this lesson, you will first convert an existin220 document to a Dreamweaver template and define editable regions.
1. | With jadevalley_template open, select File-> Save as Template. |
The file jadevalley_template contains all the information you need in a template: the logo, site navigation, standard CSS styles, and footer information, which are all common page elements for all th218 pages you'll need to develop for the Jade Valley Web site.
2. | In the Save As Template dialog, select jade_valley from the Site drop-down menu. In the Save as text box, enter jadevalley_template and click Save. When the Update Links dialog appears, choose Yes. |
Dreamweaver saves template files in a special folder, and when it moves the template file into that folder, it effectively breaks all the relative links inside the file. Fortunately, Dreamweaver's link checker catches the change and offers to fix the links for you.
You can create multiple templates for a site. To differentiate the current template from other templates you might create for the site in the future, make sure you give the template a meaningful name.
3. | In the Files panel, click the + (Windows) or arrow (Macintosh) icon next to the Template folder. You should see a file called jadevalley_template.dwt in that folder . |
Dreamweaver saves the template file in the site's Templates folder (which is created automatically by Dreamweaver as soon as you create a template for a site), with a .dwt file extension.
Tip
Never move your templates out of the Templates folder or put any non-template files in the Templates folder. Remember not to move the Templates folder out of the local root folder, so that links won't be broken.
4. | Archive the following files: jadevalley_template, template, and navbar. |
Now that the official template for the Jade Valley Web site is created, you should archive the now obsolete files to prevent confusion. You can create a special folder on your computer to store these two files in case you need them in the future. They don't need to be kept in your site file any more. Most developers find that unneeded files clutter the workspace and sometimes lead to errors.
