Build a Website - Beginning Design and Development

Kevin Frey: Hi! I'm Kevin Frey from Trans Effect LLC and today we're talking about how to create a website. Right now we're going to go over the beginning stages of the design and development process. I've created a website here, a really basic website called I Heart Planes. This is the website we're going to be building today. We're going to learn abut all the elements on the page and to start off with, we're going to learn how to set up the basic framework for this site. The program that I'm using as an example today is Adobe Dreamweaver which has a feature commonly referred to as a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editor. It's an HTML editor that let's you design a page in what's called Design Mode as you address the necessary HTML and CSS in the background, so that you don't have to directly deal with code, you can only deal with what the page looks like. There are plenty of What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editors available out there for free. Most of them have the same basic features that Dreamweaver has including the option to load predefined templates which is what we're gong to do today. So you're going to find out some of the template options that we have. You can see that over on the right here as we click on templates, it displays what the templates are going to look like. What we're going to work with today is a two-column fixed layout with a left side bar and also a header and a footer. So we're going to select that layout and we're going to hit Create. Now this brings up our basic template. You can see that there is the header and the footer, both labeled along with the side bar and the main content area. Now that we have our template loaded and set up here, in our next clip we're going to examine a template a little closer and start talking about the content.