Website Design with Dreamweaver & Fireworks

Free CSS web design guide to design and build your own website

Learn how to easily design a professional website using Fireworks and then build it into a CSS website using Dreamweaver. The cool CSS website we are going to create step-by-step is shown below:

For novices out there, Fireworks is the graphic/web design application we would be using to design the website's visual interface and to prepare images for the web site from it. Dreamweaver is the web authoring tool (HTML editor) we would be using to build our website's design template from the images exported from Fireworks (called a Dreamweaver Template - .DWT file), upto completion of the website by creating the web pages from this template and linking them together.

Software Required

Adobe Fireworks (Macromedia Fireworks prior to version 8) and Adobe Dreamweaver (Macromedia Dreamweaver prior to version 8). Since this tutorial series covers the core functions of using Fireworks and Dreamweaver to create a website, using mostly any version of these software should be fine. If you are using the CS4 version of these software please read the upgraded version of this free web design guide - Website Design with Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 and Adobe Fireworks CS4.

Prerequisite Knowledge

This tutorial series teaches you how to create a full fledged website using Fireworks and Dreamweaver and thus assumes you are familiar with some design software and HTML editor, even if you are new to Fireworks and/or Dreamweaver. Knowing how websites work and having some knowledge of XHTML and CSS programming, will be an added advantage and should make your task easier. However we have ensured that even a beginner would be able to follow our instructions.

Before you Design

A web designer's ultimate aim for a website's design is to achieve a balance between its attractiveness (targetted look-and-feel with necessary design effects), load time considerations (optimizing design elements for website size) and user friendliness (easy-to-use navigation and well laid-out easily readable content) - without entirely compromising on either of them. Between the extremes of making bare designs with cluttered content and hard-to-navigate complex designs, a professional web designer needs to learn to expertly create a web design that is impressive, cohesive, well laid out, fast-loading and easy to use. On the programming front, no compromise must be made in creating a well coded and error free website that ensures a uniform user experience - web standards compliant (valid XHTML/CSS), accessible and cross browser compatible.

Before designing a web site the designer needs to be fully aware of what type of website he/she is going to design. Unless you have some clear goals in mind it would be difficult for you to start off on the actual design. A good way to get started on your website is to decide on the layout structure, colors and overall theme beforehand. We started with the idea of needing a sophisticated design with a simple layout and the following color scheme:

Color Palette - Purple & Pink Passion

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Fireworks & Dreamweaver Website Design Steps

This free CSS website design guide teaches layout design with Fireworks and CSS/XHTML website conversion with Dreamweaver. Learn CSS Web Design by following these simple steps:

Now Lets get you started on your website design!
Continue to Step 1: Designing the website's layout with Fireworks

We would love to hear your comments and any suggestions on future tutorials we can add to this section. Thanks!