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The Site menu The Site menu provides access to the options you need to set up your site, a process required before many of the other


Dreamweaver features work properly. (Chapter 2 covers this process.) The Site menu also gives you easy access to the Check In and Check Out features, which are options that can help you keep a team of designers from overwriting each others work. (Chapter 4 talks about this feature.) The Window menu The Window menu lets you control the display of panels and dialog boxes, such as Insert, Properties, and Behaviors. To make these panels visible, select the panel name so that a check mark appears next to the feature you want to display; to hide them, select again to remove the check mark. Other panels and dialog boxes, such as CSS Styles and HTML Code Inspector, are also listed on the Window menu for easy access. The Help menu The Help menu provides easy access to help options that can assist you in figuring out many features of Dreamweaver. You also find access to the Dreamweaver template and example files on the Help menu. Templates and examples provide visual samples of common HTML designs, such as tables and frames, and provide design ideas and great shortcuts for creating complex layouts. The status bar The status bar appears at the bottom left of any open Dreamweaver document. On the right end of the status bar, you can see tool icons that control the on-screen display of your document. On the left end, you find a row of HTML codes that indicate how elements on your page are tagged. If you place your cursor in bold text that is centered, for example, the status bar might display <BODY><CENTER><B>. This feature makes double-checking the kind of formatting applied to any element on your page easy. You can also use the status bar to quickly make a selection on your page. For example, if you click the name of a tag in the status bar, the section of your page where that tag is applied is highlighted. This makes selecting a certain section of a page, such as a page, easier. 28 Part I: Fulfilling Your Dreams Working on Web Pages Created in Another Web Design Program In theory, all Web design programs should be compatible because HTML files are, at their heart, just ordinary text files. You can open an HTML file in any text editor, including Macintosh TextEdit and Windows Notepad. However, HTML has evolved dramatically over the years and different Web programs follow different standards, which can cause serious conflicts when a page created in one program opens in another. One of the reasons Dreamweaver is so popular is because it creates very clean code and is considered more accurate and more respectful of HTML standards than other programs. Dreamweaver is also better at creating pages that work in different browsers and on different platforms, but importing files created in another Web program can be challenging, even in Dreamweaver. To help with the transition, Dreamweaver includes some special features, such as the Clean Up Word HTML option, designed to fix some of the common problems with Microsoft Words HTML code. Before you start working on a site that was developed in another program, you need to import the site into Dreamweaver. I recommend you make a backup of the site first so you have a copy of all the original pages (strange things can happen when you open a site created in another program). You find step-by-step instructions for importing an existing Web site in Chapter 2. The following sections describe the most popular HTML editors and what you need to know if youre moving files from one of these programs to Dreamweaver.