Dreamweaver CS5.5: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Adding Text to Your Web Pages

Nowadays, streaming video, audio, and high-quality graphics are what draw most people to websites. After all, it’s exciting to hear the latest song from your favorite band, see a preview of a yet-to-be released blockbuster, or tune in to YouTube to see the kid down the street embarrass himself in front of a billion Web viewers.

But the fact is, the Web is woven primarily with words. iPad reviews, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga gossip, and countless personal blogs about cats still drive people to the Internet. As you build web pages and websites, you’ll spend a lot of your time adding and formatting text. So, to get your message across effectively, you need to understand how Dreamweaver works with text.

This chapter covers the not-always-simple act of getting text into your Dreamweaver documents. In Chapter 3, you’ll read about formatting that text so that it looks professionally designed.

Adding Text in Dreamweaver

In many ways, Dreamweaver works like a word processing program. When you create a new document, the blinking cursor appears at the top of the page, ready for you to begin typing. When you finish a paragraph, you press Enter or Return to start a new one. Text, as well as anything else you add to a web page, starts at the top of the page and works its way to the bottom. But you can’t type in some kinds of characters, like a copyright symbol, from the keyboard, and other kinds, like a nonbreaking space, require special keyboard combinations. ...