Why can't I just learn Dreamweaver?

Let's talk about web design for a minute.

In the print world, if you know how to use InDesign or Quark you essentially know how to create any document or page (with a couple caveats based on background knowledge like: placed images need the proper resolution, no accidental spot or RGB colors, etc). What you see is what you get.

Web design is different in that just knowing the Dreamweaver program does not allow you to make proper web pages. Or maybe a better way to put it is that there is much more required background knowledge before you will be able to build a professional, useful, successful web page. With that knowledge, Dreamweaver is a great tool for building websites but that background knowledge needs to come first.

What do you need to know before Dreamweaver is useful?

1 - You need to learn the rules for saving images for the web. Easy.

2 - HTML is how you get "stuff" on the page. You need to learn HTML and semantic markup (a fancy way of saying "tag things by their meaning, not their look"). It sounds like programming but it's really not, it's typing. You have to learn about 10 basic tags for HTML and then you're up and running. You can get a working knowledge of HTML in a couple hours. Fairly easy to learn.

3 - You need to learn CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This is, admittedly, the difficult part of web design. Everything you think of as "Design" is CSS on the web - from font control to page layout. CSS has to be created by hand by typing text to create a set of rules - you can't use a tool like the frame tool InDesign to draw a box. This isn't as difficult as it may sound - you only use about 20 CSS properties on a regular basis so that's another 20 words to understand. But yes, CSS takes a while to learn because it's really more about judgement and problem solving than learning some "code words". And that's why when people ask me "Why isn't there a program where I put stuff where I want it then makes a web page for me?" I have to tell them there isn't a program like that because the act of laying out a web page involves creativity, judgement and problem solving and no program can do that for us (yet).

Acceptance that web design is not done the same way as print design is the first step.

We have 3 web related classes:

In our Standards-Based Web Design class we use Dreamweaver as we learn the 3 topics above and we create websites at the highest level of professionalism - what's known as "Standards Based web design" - This class has my strongest recommendation.

We do have a Dreamweaver specific class that teaches all the "parts" of Dreamweaver but it is for people who are part of a team that already uses Dreamweaver and that person is not responsible for creating pages but maybe updating them or doing a couple specific things using Dreamweaver. Recommended only for special cases.

We also have a class dedicated to Creating HTML Email - even though they may look the same, the rules are completely different for web pages and email HTML pages. This class uses a very specific subset of Dreamweaver's tools along with Photoshop.

Happy Birthday Adobe (and Fritz)!

So not only is today the birthday of James Fritz, one of our Rockstar instructors, but it also marks the 25th anniversary of Adobe Systems, Inc. 25 years ago, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke left Xerox to pursue a new computer system that would incorporate graphics and text into printable pages called Interpress. Interpress and another program called JaM would evolve into the Adobe Postscript language we have all used in our graphics applications today. This was the launching point for the desktop revolution.

Think of it, without the foresight of these two scientist/ mathematicians, we would not have the great applications that are industry standards today. Its hard to believe that in 1988 was the first version of Adobe Illustrator, and three years later, in 1991, Adobe Photoshop was launched. (Makes you feel old doesn't it?)

So Happy Anniversary Adobe! Click the links below to see great video and interactive material from Adobe Systems, Inc. on their silver anniversary!

Kevin

History of Adobe Interactive Timeline
Adobe: 25 Years of Magic Newsletter
Adobe 25 Years of Innovation Video

Power mail searching in Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)

If you can remember from: , to: and subject: you will be able to get much more out of your mail searches, faster.

In any Spotlight search field (NOT just in the Mail program - this works in the Finder also) if I do a search structured like this:

from:erica to:tiffany

I get just the emails I've received from Erica that also were mailed to Tiffany (watch to make sure you don't put any spaces either side of the colon - search will break)

If I do the following search:

from:jfritz to:jsimon -subject:seminar

I get the mails I've received from jfritz that jsimon was cc'd on removing any results that include the word "seminar" in the subject (note the minus sign in front of subject)

This is a great way to narrow down your search results fast