Hello, welcome,
My name is Daniel Walter Scott. I’m a trainer here at Bring Your Own Laptop. This course is designed for people who are new to Dreamweaver and web design.
Today’s topic is: How to create your first HTML page.
In the previous tutorial, you discussed how to define a must do site first. Now we are going to see how to create our first HTML page. It’s going to be nice and basic. We’re going to preview it and then we’re going to work on some more advanced parts. For the first session, we should consider creating our first Dreamweaver page. File > new HTML page
So first go to ‘File’ and then ‘New’. Inside here, we have to be in this one that says ‘Blank page’. And we’re going to create an HTML page. An HTML page is a standard, normal and very common web page. You should be able to leave all the defaults. If you are using an earlier version of Dreamweaver, you will not have this ‘HTML 5’ document type. It will have HTML4.1 transition. It’s just an old style of HTML. The newer version of Dreamweaver, CC and above, uses HTML 5, but if you only have this older version, it will work fine for what we’ll do in this course.
Press ‘Create’ , this creates an untitled document . First, you need to save it. Go to ‘File’ and then ‘Save’. It will allow us to name it after this HTML file. Name your page index.html
When it comes to naming your files, there is one specific file that is your home page, which should have a very specific name. It must have the word ‘index. html’. This is the first page that someone, Google, Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer will look for on your website to load first. This is the first page your audience will see when they visit your website. So it has to be called that. If you have a website and it has 100 other pages but doesn’t have an index, someone like Firefox or Google Chrome won’t load any pages. So you should have at least one page called ‘index.html’. So make sure you use a lowercase ‘i’ and hit ‘Save’. So it’s called ‘index’ and it will be our home page. Adding a page title in Dreamweaver CC
The first thing you need to do when you create a home page is to give it a title. Now the title here is important for several reasons. The first reason is because of the Google search engine. If you want your website to be listed well, you need a clear title. So if you leave it as the default “untitled”, you’ll end up with a really bad ranking. So let’s explore that.
The title of this page will be “Dreamweaver Tutorials Website”. Make your title unique to your website. We’ll make sure we have good clear keywords in there. So this website is about Dreamweaver tutorials. Once you’ve written here, go to the bottom here. This is your body area. This is where your website goes. Let’s write some text. Let’s say ‘creating a website is easy with Dreamweaver’. Testing your HTML page in Dreamweaver
To find out what this title does, I’m going to click Save File and then ‘File Preview’ and ‘Browser’. So this will try to preview it in one of the browsers installed on your machine. If you’re using a PC, you’ll use I Explore, which uses Internet Explorer. If you’re using a MAC, you probably have Safari. As a designer I like to install Firefox and Google Chrome which are alternatives and preview those as well. If you have installed them and they do not appear in this list. You’ll need to go to ‘Edit Browser List’ and go find them.
I’m going to preview this using Google Chrome. It is the most popular. Firefox and Internet Explorer is overloaded. You’ll see he’s done a couple of things. You have a preview of the text snippet here. And you’ll see up here in this little tab that you’ve given me the page title ‘The Dreamweaver Tutorial Site’. That’s one of the reasons why you put a title, it appears here. And when someone bookmarks your site, it’s this small piece of text that gets included in their bookmark. But what it’s really good for is Google search results.
Why have a page title?
So if I go to google.com.au and I look up ‘Dreamweaver Tutorial’, the page title is the bit that comes up, the blue part here. So if you leave it as default, you can imagine the problems you will have. Google will never rank a page that has the words “untitled document” as its title. You need to have very clear keywords. You’ll see the words “Dreamweaver tutorial” repeated here in these titles. It’s one of the many things that Google uses. It is very important to use a page title to describe to Google what your page is about. So when you enter the title in Dreamweaver, be sure to include a title every time you create a new page.
So make sure the title describes your page well. It has to be unique for each page.So if you have 10 pages, you’ll need to have a page title for each page. So it could be a bit monotonous. Make sure it reflects well the content of your page. We don’t have much content yet.
Conclusion
So we’ve created a new page. We have made sure that it is called ‘index.html’. We have saved it. And we’ve made sure that it has a title and we’ve added a little bit of text here. But now we are going to review and add a little more content in the next tutorial.
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