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Format:
Instructional
DVD for PC/Mac
Topic:
Web
Design with Dreamweaver 8
MSRP:
$149.99
Expected Release:
Available
Now
Review
Date:
January 15, 2007
Reviewed
By: Jeremy
Hanke
Final
Score:
9.0
For
folks who read my review of Janine Warner’s first
training session for Dreamweaver 8, you may recall
that I said that it was a great way to learn the basic design
concepts of Dreamweaver so that you could make a
professional looking site for your film or production company.
Well, in this advanced series, Janine unleashes the power
of CSS, shows you how to create multimedia effects with
behaviors, and, for us filmmakers, shows powerful and professional
ways to integrate film clips and trailers in QuickTime,
Windows Media, and Flash Video to your site.
This
is the set to buy if the past set’s coverage was too
basic for your experience level. (Or if you’ve gone
through the previous training and are ready to take your
design game up a few notches.) I’ve been designing
websites for the better part of ten years and I found a
lot of stuff in this set that I wasn’t familiar with,
especially the amount of design control available in advanced
Cascading Style Sheets. Getting a handle on this great info
will get you so much farther ahead of the pack on designing
a film or production website that will get you noticed!
Understandability
As with Ms. Warner’s last series, this set is extremely
easy to understand and follow. Her teaching style is simple
to grasp and really keeps you on track. While it’s
good to know much of the information found in the first
Dreamweaver 8 training set, she goes at an easy enough
pace that you should be able to keep up even if you haven’t
gone through the last set of training. (In some ways, I
could see how it might be somewhat easier if you haven’t
gone through the last training, as CSS usage is actually
kind of at odds with the more basic HTML styles that were
presented in the last set. Since much of CSS circumvents
a lot of HTML, it could be easier for some folks to start
with a clean slate.)
Depth
of Information
Even though it’s shorter than the previous set, Ms.
Warner has packed a lot of information into this set. She
covers the alternate ways to design web pages, which exposes
you to more design perspectives than were covered in the
previous set. She looks at learning the aforementioned Cascading
Style Sheets and covers much of their use from basic to
advanced features. Then she delves into creating effects
using Dreamweaver’s layers, using Behaviors
to add interactivity, slicing with Photoshop and
Fireworks, and finally combining templates, layers,
CSS, and behaviors into a cohesive design whole. Of course,
as I mentioned before, she also shows you how to integrate
multimedia sound and video into your web design. Finally,
she wraps it all up with some more advanced tips and tricks,
which include general tips for trying to get better search
engine rankings and how to modify free Perl scripts to do
useful things like letting fans sign up to be on a mailing
list.
