Adding Database Functionality - New Perspectives on Adobe Dreamweaver CS5, Comprehensive - page 572

P roSkills
Create a Personal Web Site
Dreamweaver is the industry-standard tool for professional Web design, but it also
has a wide user base beyond the professional world. Consider these examples.
Individuals use Dreamweaver to create personal Web sites, small businesses use
Dreamweaver to create and maintain online catalogs, and educational institutions
use Dreamweaver to create promotional information and Web applications. The pos-
sibilities are infi nite.
In this exercise, you will use Dreamweaver to plan and create a personal Web site
with information of your choice, using the Dreamweaver skills and tools presented
in Tutorials 1 through 9. Use the following steps as a guide to completing your Web
site, keeping in mind the guidelines for decision making provided earlier.
Note: Do not include any personal information of a sensitive nature in any Web
sites that you create to be submitted to your instructor for this exercise. Later, you
can update the Web sites with such information, but remember that any Web sites
you post to a Web server are visible to anyone who has Internet access and a Web
browser.
1. Create a list of site goals; review the list for order of importance and wording.
2. Defi ne your target audience, researching the target audience as needed, and cre-
ate a user profi le for the site.
3. Conduct market research to gather information about three similar Web sites,
and analyze them.
4. Develop two end-user scenarios for your site.
5. Design the information architecture for the site.
6. Draw a fl owchart for the site so that you can visualize the site navigation and
page connectivity.
7. Develop a site concept and metaphor.
8. Choose a color palette, fonts, and graphic style for the site. ( Hint : You might want
to create a document that identifi es all of your choices, including hexadecimal
color codes for each color as well as a breakdown of font attributes by family,
font size, color, and style for body text, links, headings, subheadings, and so on.)
9. Create a layout design for the pages of the site.
10. Gather relevant content materials and write the page content for the pages.
Consider including a page heading and a summary sentence at the top of each
page, and then break page content into smaller sections with subheadings that
will guide the target audience through the page.
11. Create a local site defi nition and a remote site defi nition.
12. Create a page using divs and CSS styles to layout the page elements, and then
create additional CSS styles to style the page elements and content as appropri-
ate based on your site plan.
13. Export the styles to an external style sheet.
14. Create a main template for the site. Add editable regions to the template and
insert placeholder text as appropriate.