Fancy Making A Little More Money? Not Just A Dream With Dreamweaver.

Times are hard, and a chill wind is bringing down shutters on the high street. Given the increasing costs of maintaining a conventional store, and the impact on revenues of the economic downturn, countless companies large and small have been reconsidering or abandoning their town and city centre presence. Yet businesses that have not been hit by the high street decline, whether because they have kept an acceptable turnover at the checkout or because they do not operate in the retail sector, are still looking to reduce their physical presence.

After all, shops, offices and showrooms are expensive - rent, utility bills, maintenance, the payment of employees (such as cleaners, handymen or front-of-store staff) whose role relates specifically to the property - all of these make a sizeable dent in a company's profit margins. An online presence, on the other hand is much cheaper to run, requiring less space, no publicly accessible buildings, and often fewer staff. And online transactions have been growing in number year on year, providing an ever more attractive option for a wide range of businesses.

Designing and managing websites can be a very prosperous enterprise, then. And there are no shortage of people out there who have dabbled with some html coding in the past and would be more than capable of moving onto something more complex with the motivation to do so. If you've had a bit of experience with making internet content, however simple, or if you just have some good ideas for how a website might look and feel, how do you make the step from dabbling and imagining to creating?

Adobe Dreamweaver can help. Producing a website with Dreamweaver does not rely on any specific level of knowledge or experience. If you know some coding, a lot, a little, or if you know none whatsoever and never intend to learn, Dreamweaver can help would-be designers in all situations. It has a wide range of tools to help make website creation easier and more flexible, even if you have quite a lot of existing expertise - and for the novice, it can give you the means to produce a page of professional quality and consistent style. And with a short training course to get the most out of Dreamweaver, there is the potential there for a pastime at home to make you some real money.

Pages can be put together visually; images, text, forms and interactive elements can be dropped onto the page wherever you need them to be. As the page fits together, so the software creates the coding automatically - so, if you have some familiarity with code, and feel the need to tweak your creation, you can access the generated code at the touch of a button; switching between image and code couldn't be simpler.

What's more, as you're putting your page together, the Live View tool can show you how it will appear in a browser - negating a problem that many web designers have faced in the past, that different browsers will interpret code slightly differently. This way, you can guarantee that the user is getting exactly the experience you intend for them. Live View can also help provide a safety net for the less confident designer; being able to see exactly how the page is progressing allows you to address any errors if and when they appear.

Dreamweaver can also help ensure that any pages you create have a consistent and effective style. There is a separate code that can be used in tandem with html to ensure that the style and formatting of a page remains the same throughout - Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS for short - and once again, the software will provide the code for you. All you have to do is select the element of the page - such as text, headings, backgrounds - which you want to set a particular style to, pick the relevant colour or formatting, and Dreamweaver will do the rest. Of course, if you're familiar with CSS, you can still enter the code yourself, or create it visually and edit it manually afterwards.

The days when the internet seemed a goldmine, ready to be mined by anyone with the most basic skills and a good idea, are long gone. But there is still real money to be made with a little effort and a dash of style. Dreamweaver can help you make the most of your own potential.