It's All About You.

Are you an icon clicker, or a menu selector? Or are you one of those who learn keyboard shortcut combinations to help make you more productive?

Does it make more sense to you to have all of your files and folders on the left side of the workspace, or the right? Do you like to save your pages every several minutes and always know what your web site looks like with each incremental update, or can you work all morning on a new design, save your changes, and then upload the changes all at once? Do you work almost exclusively in either Code View or Design View?

One of the things that makes Dreamweaver so popular is that so much of its interface is really left up to you. You can set up Dreamweaver so it opens with the last pages you worked on already opened for you, or so it opens up with no page ready. You can have a splash screen full of recent work or nothing at all. There are hundreds of settings for dozens of parameters available to you through the Preferences. Don’t be afraid to go there and change things—that’s what it’s for.

I know that a lot of people seem to become overwhelmed when presented with dozens or hundreds of choices. "I just got this program. How am I supposed to know how I'm going to want to work in it?" It's hard to argue with that. But if you break it all down into manageable chunks, it's too much.

Twenty years ago, I was very involved with online communities on the old GEnie network, the General Electric Network for Information Exchange. We were an online subscription network, like CompuServe or America Online or Prodigy, with various forums devoted to various interests. One of mine was writing, and I hung out in the Writers' RoundTable until they finally hired me to help out. I learned there that nobody can actually write a novel.

Think about it. Nobody ever sits down and writes a novel. They put a word or two together, building a sentence. Then they read that sentence a time or two and build another one ahead or behind it. After a few of these, they've built a paragraph, and then a page, and then a chapter. Eventually, a book results. It's the same with a house or any big project.

Most people need some experience in order to really learn something. You wouldn't want to fly to Hawaii behind a captain who had only read several How-To-Fly books. You wouldn't want a loved one to schedule surgery with a new doctor who had only read about surgery. And I think it's that way with Dreamweaver, too. You can read about paragraph tags and how to insert photos and such for days, but until you actually build a web page a lot of it is just going to be theory to you. So, pull down your Preferences options and tick through a few. If you're on a PC, Preferences live at the bottom of your Edit menu. If you are using a Mac, it's under your Dreamweaver menu.

At the top of the Category pane, which has twenty individual options, is the General category. When it's selected, you have another eighteen or twenty options, and that's again just for the General category. But look them over. The first four are about starting up Dreamweaver. Do you want Dreamweaver to open pages in tabs? And if so, do you want them to always be visible? I have loved tabbed browsing since the last generation of Web browsers came out. And having two or more pages open in tabs in Dreamweaver is just as nice, for the same reasons. I have both options checked. That doesn't mean you have to have both options checked, it's just how I work.

Should Dreamweaver show you the welcome screen when you start up? From about Dreamweaver MX2000 through Dreamweaver 8, I had mine turned off, but now I like it. It presents a fast and easy way to get to pages you have recently worked on, a selection of New pages you can create and samples you can use to build on. There is also a link to the Dreamweaver Exchange site and a Getting Started tutorial, a New Features tour and some resources you may find useful. You can turn off the welcome screen from the welcome screen, or from the Preferences. I'm starting to love the way there are so often several ways to do the same thing, in Dreamweaver.

After you have used Dreamweaver for a week or so, take a moment or two and go through the Preferences panel. If you have one or another area where you feel that using Dreamweaver is awkward, check the Preferences to see if there might not be some way to change that behavior to something more to your liking, and/or look for alternative ways of accomplishing the same task. I'll bet they're in there, somewhere.