Preserving Design Integrity with Templates and Incontext Editing

Abstract

To give a unified look to a website, most pages have common elements, such as a header, navigation menu, and footer. Nobody likes repeating work just for the sake of it, so the ability to build page templates has long been one of Dreamweaver’s most popular features. All common features can be defined and locked, but Dreamweaver propagates to all child pages any changes that you make to the master template. This sounds like a wonderful idea until you realize that every time you make a change all the affected pages must be uploaded again to your remote server. On a large site, this can be a major undertaking. Nevertheless, templates can be useful on small sites or in a team environment. Because you can lock the main design elements of the page, you can generate a child page and hand it to a less experienced developer in the knowledge that only the editable regions can be changed.