Description:

With this book you'll learn:

• Web site planning techniques, including audience profiling, and reviewing competing sites
• Web design techniques such as brainstorming, choosing what technologies are suitable for your design, and creating mockups Advanced Dreamweaver MX 2004 techniques
• Web standards, including CSS and XHTML
• Implementing dynamic web sites using ASP or PHP

Dreamweaver MX 2004 Design Projects takes you through the process of creating four real-world case studies, enabling you to take your Dreamweaver skills to a new level. Each case study is written by a different web design professional, and features a common web site archetype taken from inception to completion. All are brimming with essential techniques to inspire and teach you. The four different sites are as follows:

• Christopher Schmitt’s entertainment/fan site project, dedicated to the band U2, covers setting site goals; producing user profiles to define the audience, site maps, and design mockups; refining the design and producing it in Photoshop; and finally working with Dreamweaver MX 2004 to easily construct an accessible, easy-to-maintain web site.
  
• Allan Kent’s news portal project takes you through the process of designing and building a dynamic, database-driven site with Dreamweaver MX 2004 and PHP. He looks at information architecture, building the back-end database, creating the necessary admin tools, and finally building a front-end that is both standards compliant and easy to use.
  
• Craig Grannell’s corporate site project begins with groundwork and methodology, then shows how to harness the power of CSS and Dreamweaver MX 2004 templates to rapidly get a site up and running and ensure that updates and maintenance are painless and cost effective.
  
• Rachel Andrew’s company intranet projectwalks you through the entire process of creating a company intranet using the ASP server model in Dreamweaver MX 2004. It begins with a detailed planning stage, then continues by looking at database development, providing user logins, and managing files on the server. This project utilizes built-in Server Behaviors in Dreamweaver, third-party extensions, and hand-coding.