I have put together seven tips that you will want to keep in mind for creating websites using Dreamweaver CS4.  Much of this will make sense as you begin to go through different tutorials and create websites yourself.  So, let’s get started.

Tip #1 – Stay within one font family.  One of the obvious signs of an amateur web designer is switching back and forth between several different fonts.  They use Arial, Times New Roman, fancy script fonts, and all kinds of different fonts.  You can certainly use different sizes of the same font, bold, italics, etc., but do your best to stay within one font family unless the situation calls for it.  When I see a site with several different fonts, I don’t care how great the content is, I quickly hit the back button.

Tip #2 – Avoid using all kinds of colors that clash.  This is along the same line as the previous tip.  All kinds of colored text is another amateur move.  Dreamweaver makes it very easy to use all kinds of different colors, but you need to control your urge to switching colors only when you want to emphasize a certain point.  Black text is still what is “normal” for most people and they are more apt to read through your content instead of it being baby blue text.  But, use some color because no one likes a boring site either.

Tip #3 – Keep your links blue.  Since the dawn of the modern internet, web surfers have come to know that if the next is blue and underlined, it must be a link to click.  That’s a good thing.  Stay with that.  Don’t try and make all your links pink.  If you want things to be obvious for your visitors, keep your links blue and underlined.  Some people are starting to forgo the underline these days with a “nodecoration” tag in the CSS code, but for now, I still use blue underline links almost all the time.

Tip #4 - Reduce the size of your images.  When I say reduce the size, I am talking about reducing that photo of you and your friends from a 3mb file to a 100K file or less… if possible.  You can use a program like Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to reduce the size.  One the internet, it really won’t be noticeable, especially when you scale the size of your image down from 3000 pixels wide to 400 pixels.  The main purpose of this is to get your website to load faster.  Slow loading webpages get abandoned quickly.

Tip #5 – Avoid all the flashing images.  This isn’t so much a problem these days, except for the real amateur websites.  You know what I’m talking about.  All those blinking arrows, bouncing balls, and flashing things.  It’s just obnoxious.  One blinking arrow is not a bad thing, but when your whole website makes Las Vegas look tame, you’ve gone too far.

Tip #6 – Make sure you put a copyright at the bottom of your page.  There are many people who don’t like to write their own content and would rather scour the internet to find websites with no copyright notice so they can steal your content.  Whether you take an hour to write an article, or you pay someone to write it for you.  It is your content and you need to protect it.

Tip #7 – Don’t skip the tutorials.  That’s kind of the purpose of this website.  Dreamweaver CS4 is such a huge, powerful program that there is no way you can learn it all on your own.  You can go down to Barnes and Noble and spend $60 on a 1300 page manual, or you can check out a video tutorial and learn how to program and use CS4 like a pro.  You can do what you want.  I like Dreamweaver Made Simple, but there are others as well. 

Hope this all helps!