Editorial Reviews:
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 Schmitts 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 Kents 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 Grannells 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 Andrews 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.
Customer Reviews:
 Underestimated! Unterschätzt!
Die schwache Bewertung ist für mich unverständlich und auch einige Kommentare entsprechen nicht den Tatsachen. So werden im 3. Projekt ("Corporate Website...") durchaus beispielsweise CSS wie auch Templates ausführlich eingeführt und kommentiert.
Die Autoren und Autorinnen vermögen es auf dem ihnen zur Verfügung stehenden Raum asugezeichnet ihre Projekte dicht und konzise zu vermitteln und haben mir manche Einsichten vermittelt.
Die einzige Schwierigkeit besteht wohl darin, dass mit dem 'richtigen' Projekt begonnen wird, sollte man noch nicht Experte sein: Starten mit den Kapiteln 3 & 1 würde sicherlich die Motivation mehr fördern als mit den, ich betone, ebenfalls sehr gelungenen, aber anspruchsvolleren Kapiteln 2 & 4.
 This book doesn't know who it's audience is
This book goes through 4 examples of real webpages and how they might be done. The book is written by four people and that's probably where the issue is.
It sounds like the book is aimed towards beginners, but touches on some advanced topics. It touches a little on CSS, a little on PHP/mysql, a little on design in general, etc It just sounds like the four authors didn't coordinate well.
If you are an advanced user, this book may be good in finding out how to do certain functionalities easier with dreamweaver, but still too much writing to read for that use. You may consider just getting a Dreamweaver reference manual by somebody else in that case.  Overclaims - Underdelivers
The publishers promise more than the book delivers. In Project 1 (20% of the book) non-code design issues are dealt with in a summary fashion. CSS code is built directly, without reference to the DW Manage Styles interface. Passing reference is made to DW's Templates. Much is left to your own skill set. The downloadable files degrade poorly in IE6. If you need to expand your DW skills:- Avoid. If you just want to code CSS:- consider.
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(3 reviews)
