Thanks for the cool animation Mom!

After using Netobjects Fusion for web site development for years I have found myself in the world of Joomla!.  While Joomla proves without a doubt the best choice for web development in the modern age, it requires a leap into the world of CSS.  CSS is easy enough, however, finding and quickly jumping into a new WYSIWYG was another story.  The obvious choice is Dreamweaver, but wow, have you seen just how much control that software gives you?  Inevitably the two things you need the most will take you 4 days of searching to get you over the learning curve.

I think I suffer from what many of the modern graphic artists suffer from, the laziness quality of the programmer (Programmers only program because they are too lazi to compute something twice by hand - Let the computer do it) and the difficulty in finding my "creative zone" as a graphic artist, if you combine the two, then how will I ever get anything designed if I am too lazy to hand code more after designing than if I simply designed the entire project by hand?

Just a little hot tip for your dreamweaver uses...

I think I found the two keys to being quick with dreamweaver/css development... in Netobjects I found myself more involved with graphical design to a point that the technical modifications to any code could be ignored until AFTER all the basic layout and creativity where completed.

With Dreamweaver there is no way to design the simplest layouts without all of the style elements being embeded into each div tag at creation (If there is save me some more research and let me know!).  While this works to get the ball rolling it quickly creates a mess in code (much like you saw with the original conversion of Chattanooga Clothing to laywers) and of course requires tons of work after the layout has been created to separate the style elements.  To make the work easier you can do these two things during the design (which takes away concentration on the creativity) or you can ease the work after the design with the same two quick keys...

CTRL-F11 brings up the style sheet design window... from here you can create and attach a css document.
CTRL-F5 while having a layer selected in design view(or cursor over in code view) will bring up that layers properties and allow you to edit the class,style, id, etc.

Before I tracked down these two quick keys and the resulting gui, I was hand coding all the code that dreamweaver created which completely drained any time saving features a wysiwyg editor is supposed to give you.

Now if you have been around the block or two, it is a tip like this one that can make or break your learning curve with a new development tool.  If the tool is too troublesome to use with paying jobs then you will stick with what pays the bills.  If you don't want to waste time reading and watching training videos then this is just the tip to get you into production.  At least it was for me.  The reason I offer this here is to hopefully keep you from spending as much time reading and researching to find out such a simple two hot key solution to saving time with Dreamweaver and Style Sheets.