#Page layers code

#Page layers code

If you really want to create more advanced layouts, you’ll eventually need to graduate from layers and use the CSS features in Dreamweaver, or write the CSS code yourself. There are other ways to design Web sites, such as using floating div tags to create a centered design, but that option is a lot more complex to create in Dreamweaver unless you’re quite advanced and adept at writing CSS (and that’s way beyond the scope of this article).Īlthough many people still use tables, progressive Web designers are moving away from them because CSS offers some new advantages, such as more streamlined code and better accessibility. Or, you can use tables (the slightly more complex, and some would argue soon to be obsolete, option), and you can center your design so that it floats within a browser window.Ĭentering a layout is popular on the Web because it enables you to position your design so that it better fills a screen, no matter how big that screen is. So it comes down to this: You can use the layers option to create a precise design, but you’ll have to align everything from the left side of the page, so be prepared for it to stay there no matter how wide your user’s browser window. Absolute positioning is what makes it possible to precisely place layers where you want them on a page, but because you’re specifying the location in relation to the top and left border of the page, you can’t set it to automatically center within any browser window because the size of the browser window depends on the size of your viewers’ monitors and their browser settings. Unfortunately, you can’t center your design with the layers feature because Dreamweaver creates layers by creating CSS div tags with absolute positioning. Then you can insert images, text, or any other element into your layer, and you can move layers anywhere on a page by clicking-and-dragging the crosshairs at the top-left corner. 64), but essentially, you just select the Layer icon in the Layout Insert bar, and then click-and-drag to create a layer anywhere on your page. You’ll find a tutorial on creating a design with layers in the September/October 2006 issue of Layers magazine (p. Layers in Dreamweaver are great because they’re so easy to create and they offer the most precise design control possible on the Web. When you create a table, you have the added advantage that you can easily use the center alignment option to center the entire table, creating a page that stays centered on the screen, a design trick that makes it appear that your site is better using the real estate on a monitor, even when the site is viewed in different-sized browser windows.Ī more recent option in Web design, and an increasingly popular one, is the layers feature. You can create complex designs by merging and splitting cells, and you can even nest a table inside a table cell to position elements. When you design a page with a table, you essentially create a grid and use the cells of the table as containers for all of your text, images, and other elements. In the early days, tables were the only option, and tables are still very popular.

A centered table controls this page’s layout.