Dreamweaver’s How to Guide for Beginners – Part 2

Opening a Link in a New Window
Preview your Work in a Browser
Create a Status Bar Message
Adding Subject Lines to Emails
Editing the Font List
Changing the Title that is Displayed in your Browser

So let’s begin… Open your Dreamweaver Program…

How to open a link in a new window

When you place a link on your site to another site, you don’t won’t the visitor to leave your site when they click on the link. So that is where “opening a link in a new window” comes in handy. To open a link in a new window, highlight the link that you want to open in a new window. Now look in your properties window. You will see in the Link Field – the url to that link. Right up under that you will see a field called Target. Drop down that list and choose Blank. And there you have it. When that link is clicked, it will open up in a new window and your site will still be running in the background.

How to preview your work in a browser

When you are working on a website, it looks totally different in dreamweaver than it does in a browser. Therefore, you will need to preview it in a browser to make sure things are looking the way you want them to. To preview your work in a browser, simply click F12. And that will open the page that you are working on in a web browser to show you how it looks. To preview it in other browsers go to File > Preview in Browser > And select which browser you want to preview it in. F12 will preview it in Internet Explorer.

How to create a status bar message

Have you ever been to a site that has a message at the bottom when you mouse over a link? That is called a Status Bar Message. To create a status bar message for a link, find the link that you want to apply a message to. Now go to Window > Behaviors. That will bring up your behaviors panel. Click on the ” + ” and a window will drop down. Select Set Text > Set Text of Status Bar. That will bring up a small dialog box for you to type in your message. Type in your message and click OK. That is all you have to do. Save your document and preview it in a browser.

How to add a subject line to emails

Have you ever clicked on an email link and it already has the subject in the subject field for you? You can quickly do that by adding the subject to the mailto link. Let me show you how. When you create a Contact Us link, you type in mailto:yourname@yourdomain.com in the link field in the properties window. Now add ?subject= to the end of your mailto link and type in what you want your subject to be. I will use the subject “More info on your hosting” to show you an example.
mailto:yourname@yourdomain.com?subject=More info on your Hosting
Change the yourname@yourdomain.com to your email and put whatever subject you want in there. Make sure you keep the ?subject= in there.

How to edit the font list in Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver only comes with a couple of preloaded fonts to choose from. So you have to add more to fonts to the list to get a bigger selection. To edit the font list, click on the font field in the properties window. In the drop down list, click Edit Font List. The Edit Font List dialog box will appear. Select the font that you want to add under “Available Fonts” and click the arrows to move it to “Chosen Fonts”. Then click the add button ” + ” to add it to the list. Once you are finished. Click OK.

How to change the title in the top of your browser

You can easily change the title that is displayed in the top of your browser by going to Modify > Page Properties. A dialog box will pop up. Under categories, click on title, and type in your title in the title field. When you’re finished, click OK.