Making a website using Adobe Fireworks

Adobe Fireworks

Making a website using Adobe Fireworks can be both difficult and very easy. This depends on your knowledge base as well as the extent of the website you are creating. Many designers that have been around for decades and use Fireworks, or any Adobe products for that matter, have still yet to master them. This hub will be my portal to my Fireworks tutorials and I also have one for My Photoshop Tutorials as well. Heres if you want to skip on to the Dreamweaver Portion. You can also view My Website. Enjoy.

There are many steps in the development process. These tutorials are basic for beginners and as time goes by I will have some more moderate to expert tutorials up for you guys. If you have never made a website before, I recommend you follow the steps in order and not skip any. Of course, if you've does this before, you can probably skip a step or two.

Getting started...

This is your starting point, here you will learn how to create a basic background. A header, where you will put your website name and a footer where you can put contact information, rights information, mini-links.

• Creating a backdrop, header and footer.

Every site needs a good, user-friendly navigation. You can have a really great website, but without a decent navigation portal, no one will ever see it. People will tend to spend more time on sites that are easy to navigate through.

• Choosing and implementing a site navigation.

After you have a way for people to see all of your pages, your going to need some color, some umph. I like to add pictures and any media I want before I put my text in, for me it makes it easier to build your text around the things you dont really want to move.

• Adding photos and video clip placeholders.

Lets put some content in you page. I dont think I need to explain this, your making a website for a reason. Whether its some facts about snakes in brazil or how to fix a 2008 Toyota Camry, now is the time to add it. This will be the biggest and most time consuming part of the process, make sure your content is something that will interest people and well laid out or people will simply go elsewhere.

• Adding your text and content.

Here you will learn about the slice tool, this is a key part in your navigation process and should be done once your ready to put your site online. Without this, your buttons will not work, thus you should not skip it.

• Slicing your page (do not skip).

When creating a hover-image for your buttons, you will need to create two images for each page. You could of course skip this step, but you could also microwave your cell phone. While microwaving your cell phone will most likely destroy it and set you back to the stone ages, same goes for this not a good idea.

• Creating hover-images and saving a separate page for your navigation (do not skip).

While this wont be the last step of making your website, this will be the last one you will do in Fireworks. Next you will need to save and export your html (code in the form of tables that makes your website usable for the internet) to either a editing program, for all of my tutorials I will use Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. This is the most widely used program for developing websites, it is highly intergrated with all other Adobe Suties along the whole process.

• Saving and exportation of the html to Dreamweaver.