Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual

Chapter 6. Images

Nobody believes that a picture is worth a thousand words more than today’s Web designers, as evidenced by the highly visual nature of the Internet. In fact, it’s not difficult these days to stumble onto a home page composed almost entirely of graphics, as you can see in Figure 6-1.

Even if you don’t want to go that far, understanding how to use graphics effectively is invaluable. Whether you want to plop a simple photo onto your page, cover it with clickable “hotspots,” or design an interactive set of buttons that light up when the cursor passes over them, Dreamweaver makes the job easy.

Adding Images

If you were writing out the HTML instructions for your Web page by hand, you’d insert an image into a Web page using the image tag: <img>. For example, the HTML snippet <img src="images/george.jpg"> tells a browser to display a graphic file named george.jpg, which you can find in the images folder. (An image tag’s primary property is called the source [src] property; it indicates the URL or path to the graphics file.)

Dreamweaver does all this coding for you automatically when you insert a picture into your fledgling Web page:

1. Save the Web page that will contain the image.

   To insert an image, Dreamweaver must determine the path from your Web page to that image, which could be anywhere on your hard drive. As with links, saving the page before you proceed lets Dreamweaver correctly determine the path from the page you just saved to the image.

   Figure 6-1. Some Web sites rely ...