Site Design: Start Making Pages

STEP EIGHT: ROUGH OUT THE INDEX

Go to it. Start by defining the site. At this stage, all that really means is creating a folder to hold all the site files and specifying that in the site definition—you don't have to worry about the FTP info right now, though you could put that in.

Then open a new page, save it as "index.html" (in the same place as your style sheet), attach the style sheet using Text --> CSS Styles --> Attach Style Sheet and then start designing. Use DW's table tools to layout the design and then throw some rough links and graphics and whatnot into the table cells. Your goal in this step is to begin drafting the index page.

This stage can actually be a rather slow process, because it's not always easy to move from a concept to a reality. This is also the stage where you really start learning DW the hard way, because you need to figure out how to do what you want to do, and you get lots of practice with DW's tools, and you start to find some of the limitations of the software. You may, at this stage, want to return to the DW Tutorial for some help on how to do all the basics.

Of course, roughing out the design is only the first step here. Then you start to test and tweak.