pageSUMMARY

Take care of all essential links, headlines, title tags etc before starting on the content of the page. You can refine them later.

Best Practice when Creating a New Web Page

Identify the best workflow for yourself

When I create new pages within a section I find it easiest to duplicate an existing page (such as the index.html page in the designing-a-website directory), rename it with an appropriate name (in lower case with hyphens/dashes instead of spaces), open it and start working on it. To duplicate the document you can do one of the following:

Right click (or control click) on it in File View and select Edit/Duplicate from the submenu (figure 1).
Open the existing home page (index.html) and select File/Save As, select the destination folder and click OK. If you are asked to ‘Update Links’, click OK. The new document

Creating a new Web Page in Dreamweaver

Figure 1

It’s a good idea to have a checklist of ‘must do’ actions before cracking on with the content. My checklist looks something like this:

Checklist when creating a new web page

Make sure the correct top navigation is in place, showing the current section as ‘active’. Do this by replacing the menu library item with the navigation bar relevant to the current section - in this case the Nav02-Designing-a-Website.lbi library item.
Update the breadcrumb trail with the same H1 headline as the page title and ensure that the correct links are in place. Make sure that the end of the trail (the name of the current page) is not made into a link.
Insert the Title and Description ‘Meta Data’ which should be unique to this page. Keywords also used to be of importance here, but search engines have ceased to use them as a guide for on-page content.

Time to fly the nest...

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