Setting Page Properties - Dreamweaver CS5

This tutorial discusses setting page properties in Dreamweaver CS5

We are soon going to start to put some content onto our pages. But, before we do that, we need to set some general properties.

Looking at index.html when it is open, the Properties panel below the document window has various values that we will often assign.

In the Properties panel there is a button labelled Page Properties.... Clicking that invokes the Page Properties dialog.

Before starting to set page properties, it's important to recognise that Dreamweaver prefers to set many page properties using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which we're going to look at in detail later. As you can see from the dialog, Dreamweaver uses CSS for Appearance, Links and Headings.

There is an alternative for Appearance and that is to use HTML (HyperText Markup Language).

Any page properties you set apply only to the page to which you apply them, so you can avoid excessive duplication by using CSS and other techniques (such as the use of templates) when creating pages. But, more on all of that later.

For now, let's look at some of the categories of page properties, starting with Appearance (CSS).

Note that the Page Properties are set initially with defaults, such as a default font. But here I've selected a set of fonts including Arial for the font with a default size of 10 point, with black text on a cream background. I've also specified a 6mm margin all around. I could have chosen a graphic as a background image, repeated across or down the page.

Click Apply to check the effect of the changes, then OK to save the changes.

If your page is to contain a lot of text with a clear structure you may want to set Heading Page properties, that lets you set the properties for up to 6 heading styles.

The Title /Encoding properties are very important.

You should specify a suitable page title. The other settings relate to the character set and encoding used on the page, and unless you have a very specific reason to use them (and know what you are doing!) it's best to leave them at the default values for the moment.

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