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One other thing I will show you over here on the corner, this little piece of information in the very bottom right of your screen is telling you two things. First, it is telling you the weight of your page; in this case this page is 36k. That means all of the images, all of the text, all of the code on this page adds up to only 36k and it will download at 6 seconds. But 6 seconds relative to what? Well, that is a preference setting. You can choose what connection speed you want to target.

I am going to finish this introductory lesson with a look at preferences. Now, like most programs, there are many preferences you can set in Dreamweaver but I am just going to focus on a couple of key preference options that can dramatically affect the things we will do in the rest of this lesson.

I want to make sure your preferences are set the same way mine are, so that things will work as we go through the rest of the lesson. So, follow me up here to the edit menu if you are on a PC. If you are in a Macintosh, this is under the Dreamweaver menu, on a Mac you will choose Dreamweaver preferences, on a PC you will choose Edit and all the way down at the bottom their, preferences.

If you want to change the connection speed that you target with your websites, you do that under the status bar category and preferences. Notice here at the bottom it says connection speed. And if you click on this little pull down, you will see you have a number of connection speeds you can target.

Now, anybody out there still trying to target 144IPDU 56k I think is a pretty safe option. Most people are using a modem or probably at least using a 56k and if you think it is a tolerable download speed at 56k then you can rest assure that anybody with a cable modem or a DSL is going to be fine.

So, I like 56k that is the default in Dreamweaver. But again, if you are designing a site and you know you got a high end user base, you may want to increase this so that the number of seconds reflected here will be calculated based on the connection speed that you prefer.

So, let us look at some of the CSS preferences because we are going to spend a lot of time working on CSS in this series. Yes, the number one requests I have had since the first training I did on Dreamweaver was more CSS and trust me; I appreciate where you are coming from. CSS has become the way to work on the web. So, we will use CSS throughout the rest of this training. And to make sure we are setup to do that together. Let us look these preferences.

So, in CSS category, there are just a couple of things I want to make sure we have set the same. So, as we go through future lessons, you would not have any trouble. The first is to keep this checked. Open CSS files when modified. This means that when you change a CSS definition in an external style sheet, that style sheet will open in Dreamweaver. Now, this will make more sense to when we get in to it. But it is important that you have this checked the same way I do or when I do this later, that file will not open automatically for you and you would not see what I am talking about.

I would also leave the default here, edit using CSS dialogue. I like using the CSS dialogue. I think it is the most comfortable place to make all the changes you might want to your CSS styles. Now, we will look at some other places you can make adjustment especially in the CSS pane which is at the right side of your screen. There are some great shortcuts in there that we will get into. But for now, keep this checked edit using CSS dialogue.

Now, click over to the layers category and in layers category, I want you to check nest when created within a layer. Again, that gives you an option to nest layers that would not be possible if you do not this checked. The add resize fix when inserting layer option, I am going to leave that unchecked. I am not going to worry as much about Netscape 4 in this lesson as you might. If you have got users who are still using Netscape 4, you are designing for a pretty basic audience. That is now a very small percentage of the users out there on the web.

If you are trying to design from the broadest audience, checking this enables an extra tool in Dreamweaver that will have resize your layers to makeup for some differences between Netscape and Internet Explorer in its support for layers. After Netscape 4, that is Netscape 5 and beyond. This is no longer necessary.

One other thing I will show you over here on the corner, this little piece of information in the very bottom right of your screen is telling you two things. First, it is telling you the weight of your page; in this case this page is 36k. That means all... click to read more