Using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004

Document Properties

Some properties can be set for the whole document

Title

The title of the document/HTML page is the part that is displayed at in the top of the browser window and used as the title of the document if you save it as a bookmark or 'favorite' in the browser. It's a good idea to use unique, descriptive titles for all your documents.

To add or edit the title, change it in the Title field at the top of the document window: .

Text Colors & Background

To change the colors of the text on the page and/or the color of the page's background, choose Page Properties from the Modify menu.

To change the colors of each item, click on the little color box next to its name and select a color from the palette that appears. Notice that when you select a color, its RGB color number appears in the box next to it.

• Background Color (4) is the background color of the page (normally this is white)
• Text Color (3) is the color that regular text will be (normally this is black).

Always be sure to use text colors that contrast nicely with the background color (never put light text on a light background, etc).

You can also choose to have an image as the background. The image will be repeated (tiled) accross the entire background to fill it up. To select an image as background, either type in the filename in the Background Image box (5) or use the Browse button to find and select an image on your hard drive. Images must be in either JPEG (.jpg) or GIF (.gif) format.

To change the properties of the links across the page, click on Links in the left side of the window.

• Link color (8) is the color that the text of links will be before they have been clicked on (normally this is blue).
• Visited links (9) is the color that the text of links to files you have already visited will be (normally this is purple)
• Active links (11) is the color that the text of links will turn while you are clicking on them (normally this is red).
• Underline style is whether links will be underlined or not.

Once you're done setting these properties, click OK to close the window.

Keywords & other meta tags

Keywords, Descriptions and other meta tags are used in indexing documents in search engines. If you want to add Keywords to your document, go into the Head properties by selecting HTML from the Insert menu, then Head Tags. Choose 'Keywords'. In the Insert Keywords window

Type in the keywords or phrases you want to add, separated by commas, then click OK. (Other meta tags can be selected/inserted by selecting them in the same way from the menu.)

Jennifer Heise, Last updated May 27, 2003