Create a Blank Template
You can use the New Document dialog box to create Dreamweaver templates. By default, templates are saved in the Templates folder of your site.
Select File > New.
In the New Document dialog box, select the Blank Template category.
Select the kind of page you want to create from the Template Type column. For example, select HTML template to create a plain HTML template, select ColdFusion template to create a ColdFusion template, and so on.
If you want your new page to contain a CSS layout, select a predesigned CSS layout from the Layout column; otherwise, select None. Based on your selection, a preview and description of the selected layout appears on the right side of the dialog box.
The predesigned CSS layouts provide the following types of columns:
Fixed Column width is specified in pixels. The column does not resize based on the size of the browser or the site visitor’s text settings.
Liquid Column width is specified as a percentage of the site visitor’s browser width. The design adapts if the site visitor makes the browser wider or narrower, but does not change based on the site visitor’s text settings.
Select a document type from the DocType pop-up menu. In most cases, you will want to leave this selected to the default selection, XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
Selecting one of the XHTML document type definitions from the DocType (DTD) menu makes your page XHTML-compliant. For example, you can make an HTML document XHTML-compliant by selecting XHTML 1.0 Transitional or XHTML 1.0 Strict from the menu. XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) is a reformulation of HTML as an XML application. Generally, using XHTML gives you the benefits of XML, while ensuring the backward and future compatibility of your web documents.
Note: For more information about XHTML, see the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website, which contains the specification for XHTML 1.1 – Module-Based XHTML (www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/) and XHTML 1.0 (www.w3c.org/TR/xhtml1/), as well as XHTML validator sites for web-based files (http://validator.w3.org/) and local files (http://validator.w3.org/file-upload.html).
If you selected a CSS layout in the Layout column, select a location for the layout’s CSS from the Layout CSS pop-up menu.
- Add to Head – adds CSS for the layout to the head of the page you’re creating.
- Create New File – adds CSS for the layout to a new external CSS styles sheet and attaches the new style sheet to the page you’re creating.
- Link To Existing File – lets you specify an existing CSS file that already contains the CSS rules needed for the layout. To do this, click the Attach Style Sheet icon above the Attach CSS file pane and select an existing CSS style sheet. This option is particularly useful when you want to use the same CSS layout (the CSS rules for which are contained in a single file) across multiple documents.
(Optional) You can also attach CSS style sheets to your new page (unrelated to the CSS layout) when you create the page. To do this, click the Attach Style Sheet icon above the Attach CSS file pane and select a CSS style sheet.
Select Enable InContext Editing if you want to create a page that becomes InContext Editing-enabled as soon as you save it.
An InContext Editing-enabled page must have at least one div tag that can be specified as an editable region. For example, if you’ve selected the HTML page type, you must select one of the CSS layouts for your new page, since these layouts already contain pre-defined div tags. The InContext Editing editable region is automatically placed on the div tag with the content ID. You can later add more editable regions to the page if you like.
Click Preferences if you want to set default document preferences, such as a document type, encoding, and a file extension.
Click Get More Content if you want to open Dreamweaver Exchange where you can download more page design content.
Click the Create button.
Save the new document (File > Save). If you haven’t added editable regions to the template yet, a dialog box appears telling you that there are no editable regions in the document. Click OK to close the dialog box.
In the Save As dialog box, select a site in which to save the template.
In the File Name box, type a name for the new template. You do not need to append a file extension to the name of the template. When you click Save, the .dwt extension is appended to the new template, which is saved in the Templates folder of your site.
Avoid using spaces and special characters in file and folder names and do not begin a filename with a numeral. In particular, do not use special characters (such as é, ç, or ¥) or punctuation (such as colons, slashes, or periods) in the names of files you intend to put on a remote server; many servers change these characters during upload, which will cause any links to the files to break.
Using the Assets Panel to Create a Template
- In the Assets panel (Window > Assets), select the Templates category on the left side of the panel
. - Click the New Template button
at the bottom of the Assets panel. A new, untitled template is added to the list of templates in the Assets panel. - While the template is still selected, enter a name for the template, then press Enter (Windows) or Return (Macintosh). Dreamweaver creates a blank template in the Assets panel and in the Templates folder.
