I wanna, dream lover, so I don't have to dream alone!

The general feeling amongst my fellow peers this week was one of frustration. Getting to grips with an application as vast as Dreamweaver is quite an undertaking in such a short space of time, even with a good knowledge of page layout and design programmes. The how's, which's and where's are easy, it's the why's that get you. Why are my tables collapsing? Why does my cell appear a different size in my browsers? why are there 3 layout modes? Why does this colour not match up? Why won't my table stretch to the bottom?

These are a few of the many questions I was asked on Wednesday from various people in the class, as if I was some kind of Guru or 'dream weaver'. Truth is, (and if you look at one of my first blog entries you will see why) I am on this course because I had a portion of knowledge about various design applications, just enough to get by, and the idea was to learn the rest by having it taught to me in a bit more detail. I knew the how's, which's and where's before September. I, like many others, wanted to know the why's.

I am learning at the same rate as everyone else, the only difference being I have a head start, or so I thought. There are others in the group who are far more experienced in how to put a website together but maybe don't have the creativity to end up with a polished, appeasing product. Then there are the ones who have a great eye for design but not sure how to put it into practice due to their limited knowledge of Deamweaver. I'm sure that most of the class fall into one of these categories, myself included.

I am very interested to see what happens on the user testing day on the 14th February. A recreation of the St Valentines day massacre? or will Cupid be shooting around his arrows of love and adorance?

The only advice I can give at this stage is to check out these 3 books. They are listed in order of preference. These books were invaluable when I started from nothing, to creating websites that were far from dynamic but half decent.

Dreamweaver 8 for dummies, Amazon, £11.21
Dreamweaver 8 Bible, Amazon, £22.39
Sams Teach Yourself Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 in 24 Hours £14.51
(note: Sam is a big fat liar)

If you buy all 3 of these books you may also need to check out this link too.

In my own work/spare time, I finished a website this week using the same ideas I used for my assignment screen designs. The concept being that I thought it would help me practice creating a similar website and make my assignment go much quicker. I created this one in Dreamweaver 4 which although it has it's limitations, is easy to get to grips with. I am creating the assignment site in Dreamweaver 8 which is like going from a Reliant Robin to a F1 Grand Prix car overnight.
Very similar but watch those turns.

Comments very much appreciated and YES they asked for an intro screen. However I would like to know why there is a white box around the animation in IE6 but not in Firefox. If you know how I can solve this then please let me know. And please tell me in plain English. (sorry CSS trio)

I also created a small 3 page website for a Roy Orbison tribute act who has finally taken the big step of getting a web presence. Doing this website has also taught me about frames, search engines, keywords and ranking. Thanks to John for explaining this in a very informative email and somethiing I aim to find out more about over the coming weeks.