For the past 23 years I have taught myself all the computer programs I use from Freehand, Photoshop, lllustrator, Indesign, plus many others. I rarely had to look up something in a book and get the answer.

Not so with Dreamweaver!

I can't seem to get anywhere with this program. I have learned much over the last 2 years I have been using it but I am NOWHERE NEAR where I want to be. This has been the hardest program there is for me to learn because of all this stupid code. Go ahead call me a designer and not a programmer because it is true. I hate code and after 2 years of this program I hate it even more. I just want it to do what i want it to do!

Can't they simplify the program for us stupid designer types?

I have books on the program and even subscribe to Lynda.com for their advice but even after going over the same module 3 times I still don't have it right.

I just want to take a file from Photoshop CS3, slice it up and bring it into Dreamweaver and HAVE IT WORK RIGHT! Something always goes wrong and hours and hours of wasted time is spent in a fruitless search for what happened in trying to fix it. I have another post in the forum about this issue but no one has given me any answers.

Can someone please tell me where to find this answer? The issues is I just can't deal with those stupid white spaces that show up when the text goes beyond the slice area from Photoshop.

Surely there is an answer out there!

Please, please, PLEASE someone help me find it!

Thanks
Kelly

Hi Kelly,
you sound pretty frustrated <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile_sad.gif border=0 align=middle>

I have a similar background but am much more of a coder - I've not actually tried slicing a large image up and putting it into DW so I'm not the best person to answer that, but if you could post a link to a page that is showing the problem it would be a lot easier to help.

my own impression is that dw does not render pages well in design view, so you often don't see the issues until the page is served.

I think the process of designing in PS and exporting to DW is going to always cause problems. PS is no more of a website design program than DW is an image editor. PS can obviously export HTML, but you're just going to be frustrated if you expect your websites to display correctly. I personally use Fireworks for my mockups and web image exporting, but it has the same limitations of PS.

I would recommend learning how to create your basic page layouts in DW and then bringing in your images as needed. If you don't want to learn how to create the layouts, use DW templates or try something like www.justdreamweaver.com/webassist-css-sculptor.html to create the CSS layouts for you in DW. Then it's just a matter of bringing in your images and your sites will go together very quickly.

Edited by - webrehash on 15 Mar 2008 03:29:07

Ryan summed it up pretty well - try some of those templates in the first instance.

another thing to consider is that if your text is in images then the search engines can't see it, which means it's probably going to invisible to potential users of your site too.

I spent a long time learning how to use css and getting familiar with layout using it - not easy but once you get past a certain point and you understand how to use css properly it's pure magic. In fact I needed something quick and dirty a few months ago and thought I would just use a table type layout, within about an hour I had totally deleted all the files and was back with css - seems strange but I couldn't get the effects I wanted, I'd got so used to styling things like lists.

My take on it is that as the web has matured the bar to entry has been raised - we need to spend more time getting familiar with the standards and working with them, the days of the lash-up site are coming to an end.

Thanks for all of your advice. It has been good. I am much calmer now and regret venting my frustrations on this forum.

I am taking everyones advice and make changes in what I am doing. The consensus seems to be that my current Photoshop-to-Dreamweaver plan, as a single entire page, is not going to work right. I will do more to learn html and CSS and use it in a simplified way that only deals with parts of the web page at a time.

I believe that this will work.

Here is my original site with all of the problems: www.bestimageads.com/WESTSHORE2/index.html

Here is a revised one that works well in IE on a PC but doesn't on a MAC: www.westshorecashloans.com/

Thanks again.
Kelly

HI again,
that revision looks really good, I viewed it with FF2 on Mac, there was just a width difference with columns but apart from that it looked good to me - if you happen to be developing on mac then get cssedit it's shareware and really good

Keep up the good work