DH Templates

Dreamweaver Website Template - duplicate with css?

Adobe Dreamweaver has an ability to create a template to use on an entire website, and all you have to do is create the parts of the webpage that will remain the same throughout each page, such as the structure, background, and navigation, and then you specify the parts of the template that are editable, kind of like an empty table cell where you can put all you text and graphics that are specific to each page. then when you create the individual pages, you link to this template, make your changes for that page, and upload them along with the template document. This is especially helpful with large websites, where if you needed to make a change to the navigation for instance, you wouldn't have to edit and reload hundreds of pages, just one document (the template). I have been trying to find out how to accomplish the same thing without the need for dreamweaver, as I already have a program I use, and cannot to afford to buy the program, and downloading trials every month is not ideal. I've been learning css, and am very fond of using external style sheets, so I was wondering if it's possible to do the same thing as dreamweaver, using css somehow. Any help what-so-ever, whether a full answer or at least a point in the right direction, would be very much appreciated. Thank you! thank you circusmort, that's what i was afraid of. i will take your ideas into consideration.

Public Comments

1. Dreamweaver templates and CSS are very different things, while CSS can control the layout and the look of every document in the site templates just control the html content. so no - it's NOT possible to have CSS do the job of a dreaweaver template. However - if you learn up on PHP what it's possible to do is just have one page on your site and use php include to take the basic text content into specific areas of the page. you could also look at using iframe. One other thing you may wish to consider is that it's very likely possible to do a search and replace in your website for code. So if you have a section is your site like <div id="header">this is the title</div> you could do a search and replace to find "<div id="header">this is the title</div>" and replace it with your new code, add something on to it or delete it altogether and change all the pages in your site in one fell swoop.