Using and Creating Dreamweaver Templates

Time is money, as we all know - no more so than in the world of website design. If you've mastered the basics of Dreamweaver, or perhaps even some raw html coding too, you might be frustrated at just how long it takes you to plan, design, and execute a site. Unless you're a seasoned designer with a bespoke specification you promised to do for a client, then there are much simpler, stress-free ways of making websites quickly - you do it with templates.

"Isn't this cheating, or cutting corners?" I hear the experienced webweavers among you cry. Well, perhaps in the past it was considered a cheap shortcut for the inexperienced designer, but today, templates are big business, and used by everyone, from the smallest personal family site, to a big corporate business. Even better, if you create your own templates while working on a site, you can update the whole thing at once instead of page-by-page.

What is a template? Think about how most websites are structured - it usually follows a pattern. You have the logo at the top, the navigation buttons or sections, the larger concentration of text in the middle, and the footers. You can buy commercial templates that have certain themes, for example - gardening, or for an e-commerce mobile phone business. The sheer variety of themes is huge, and you can usually find what you're looking for. Some are even free! Most are cheap (under 50 pounds sterling), but you'll pay more for 'exclusivity', that is, the template is then no longer offered for sale to anyone else, so it's exclusively yours.

Other templates are the ones you can create yourself within Dreamweaver. Let's say you have a site with ten pages... and you make one small change. Do you have to change every single page to implement the new part of it? Not with a template. You only need to alter the template, and the pages will get updated alongside it. Simply create a page with no unique content (meaning, the basic navigation and layout that is on every page, regardless of content) and then go to file - save as template.

Voila! You have a template to work from (notice that there's a bar at the top of the screen that reminds you that you're working with a template). You can beaver away and edit sections of the template, but make sure you tell Dreamweaver which of your web pages will be using the template - by going to modify, then template, then "apply template to page".

Perhaps now you've grasped the basic advantages of templates, you'll want to know how to do more with them - or if you're very confident, you might want to turn your hand to professional web design (or template design!) in order to earn some money doing it. Get yourself some more training to back up your ambition, and then join one of the many reselling sites for templates.

The market for designing templates can be lucrative if you know where and what to sell. You earn a commission from every template, or you can adapt them (with the correct license permissions) and try and make your living as a web designer. Why not give it a go?

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Author is a freelance copywriter. For more information on dreamweaver.training, please visit http://www.microsofttraining.net

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