Dave Sawyer McFarland
Dave Sawyer McFarland is a Web designer, instructor, speaker, and the author of Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual and CSS: The Missing Manual. You can learn more about his books and work at www.sawmac.com.
- Features: Written by Dave Sawyer McFarland on October 25, 2011
Web designers always battle against information overload. As marketing, customer service, and the CEO request more and more content on the home page, designers fight to keep their designs legible. One of the most popular solutions is the "content slider" — a simple slideshow-like interface for displaying one picture or chunk of content at a time. Many information-heavy sites use sliders to show images, text, and links in bite-sized chunks that slide across the screen.
- Features: Written by Dave Sawyer McFarland on May 18, 2011
So far in this series, you've learned how to set up a working copy of WordPress on your desktop computer and then how to modify a WordPress theme to customize its appearance. Now for the last part of the puzzle: getting your WordPress site from your local testing machine to your Web server for all the world to see.
- Features: Written by Dave Sawyer McFarland on March 14, 2011
If you've read Part I of this series, you should have a working copy of WordPress running on your computer—or at least you know how to set it up. In this second part of the series, I'll show you how to use Dreamweaver to create your own WordPress design—or actually, how to customize one of WordPress's many themes to match the look and feel you're after.
About WordPress Themes
- Features: Written by Dave Sawyer McFarland on February 2, 2011Body:
WordPress is one of the Web's most popular applications.
- Features: Written by Dave Sawyer McFarland on November 17, 2010
Dreamweaver is a powerful, full-featured tool for building large and complex Web sites. Many of its tools help you build Web sites faster and more efficiently. But are you using Dreamweaver to its fullest? In this article, I present 10 tips that I wish someone had given me when I started working with Dreamweaver.
#1: Put the Insert Bar in Its Place
- Features: Written by Dave Sawyer McFarland on March 26, 2010
There's a lot of activity on the part of browser developers, font foundries, and online services to support a wider selection of fonts on Web pages. However, it's a bit like the Wild West: disorganized and chaotic, with multiple Web font formats and techniques fighting for supremacy. The good news is that as long as you take into account these differences, you can start using Web type now.
- Features: Written by Dave Sawyer McFarland on February 8, 2010
They say that limiting your options can lead to creative solutions. This is certainly true for Web designers and typography. Since the beginning of the Web, our typographic choices have been limited by the fonts available on other people's computers. The so-called "Web safe" fonts -- Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Courier, Verdana, Georgia, and a few others -- have dominated Web site typography because we can't always be sure that the person on the other end of the Web browser has any other fonts installed.
- Features: Written by Dave Sawyer McFarland on September 16, 2009
If you've worked with Photoshop, you've probably adjusted a document's layers opacity to create transparency effects that blend layers together. And if you've placed text over a photo in InDesign or QuarkXPress, you've probably added a transparent screen behind the text to dull the photo's contrast and make the text legible.
- Features: Written by Dave Sawyer McFarland on August 5, 2009
- Features: Written by Dave Sawyer McFarland on July 9, 2009
As you read in the previous article in this series -- Master Templates in Dreamweaver, Part I -- Dreamweaver's Template feature streamlines the process of adding pages to a Web site. Templates also make sitewide changes to global page elements, such as navigation bars and copyright notices, a snap. However, some designers are afraid that templates lead to pages that look like they've been produced in a factory: all alike in appearance and with no visual individuality.
