As technology improves and companies are given more ways to improve their websites, the standard of internet portals also rises.

These days internet surfers are a savvy bunch and they can tell an expert site from a novice one, and this is sure to have an impact on the way they view your company. Computer users are likely to be turned off by missing text, blurred images and clashing colours that exist on some portals. However, Adobe Dreamweaver has been designed so your portal can rise head and shoulders beyond the rest and complement the professionalism of your business.

Even if you are a novice computer user, the application can help you to put together a slick website that would make an expert proud - if you prefer, you can attend training courses to boost your knowledge of this product. Websites have moved on greatly and many have evolved from being basic information portals to fully interactive experiences that feature a host of media that can entertain your visitors. Dreamweaver is an application that you can use to turn your basic ideas into a high-functioning site.

Inbuilt templates are available to get you started or you can go it alone and entirely make your own pages. The product's integrated Cascading Style Sheets are ideal for quick website development, as they allow you to make changes to one document that affect your files as a whole. This means that if you have several pages of text, but want to change the colour of the font, you do not have to do lots of individual actions to achieve this.

Once you have developed a few pages, added colour, changed the font and made further adjustments you may decide that it is time to turn your portal into a more interactive website. Dreamweaver give you this opportunity via its Behaviors, which are inbuilt scripts that bring your site to life. For example, you may be keen to add pop-up boxes to your pages when a web user rolls a curser over a specific area, or if you wanted to exchange one image for another following the same action, this too is possible by using Behaviors.

There are many different kinds of scripts that are already included in Dreamweaver that can help you to add these extra, versatile functions to your website. Behaviors can be programmed to do an array of different tasks so you have great control over the finished look of your website. As mentioned previously, you are able in Dreamweaver CS4 to use the Swap Image script in order to exchange one illustration for another.

If you are interested in adding videos to your portal, you may like to use the application's Open Browser Window function. In this example, Behaviors can be programmed so that if someone clicks in a specified area of your webpage, a new window opens that plays video clips. These kinds of features are great for enriching the experience of your web users and can help turn your website into a well-visited location on the World Wide Web.

In addition to adding these interactive elements, you also have some freedom to decide how the Behaviors are activated. For example, if may be preferable to set the scripts in motion by simply rolling the cursor over a defined area. However, you are free to programme the Behaviors so they are only triggered when a web user clicks in the correct location on your website.