What Most People Don’t Know About Dreawmeaver Templates (Even Many Web Designers!)

If you're new to Dreamweaver or even if you're a seasoned web site builder, chances are you've heard the term Dreamweaver Templates. You may even have used one, BUT did you know...

There's something most people don't actually know about Dreamweaver templates (Not even many professional web designers!)

You see there are actually TWO types of Dreamweaver templates and one of them especially can save you literally days and days of work IF you use it correctly.

What am I talking about here? Well let me show you...

As I mentioned earlier there are 2 types of dreamweaver templates, the first (and most common) is simply a pre designed page, sometimes a number of pages that you can purchase just about anywhere on the internet, and you simply fill the blank spaces with your own content.

Here's an example of the sort of template sites that I'm talking about:

What you'll find is that many of these "Dreamweaver Templates" are really nothing more than website templates, (the good news is they can be used in just about any web design software)

By now you're probably wondering... "Sure they're website templates, that's all I want!"

Well no actually, that's only because I haven't shared with you the second type of template yet. Once you discover how this template works it'll change your view on Dreamweaver Templates FOREVER!

You see the second type of template is REALLY a dreamweaver template. What I mean by that is that you can ONLY use them in Dreamweaver. Here's what they do...

A REAL Dreamweaver template is like a "MASTER" page, that you then create all your website pages from. Now here comes the really cool part (the one that will save you DAYS of work):

When you make a change on the MASTER template ALL the sub pages are updated with that change.

Master Template



Web Pages Created From Template





Which means that no matter how many pages you have in your website - 5, 10, 50 or even over 100 you only need to make one change to one page to update your whole website!

So imagine this, say you've created your navigation bar and uploaded your site, and a few weeks later you decide to add another section to your website, of course you'll also need to update your navigation bar.

If you've used a dreamweaver template, all you need to do is open the template, make the change and ALL 350 pages of your website are updated instantly! Now is that a time saver or what? Can you imagine how long it would take you to update all those pages manually?

Sounds good to you? It should. So let's get into the mechanics of how they actually work:

When you create a Master template you'll create 2 "regions"

*Locked region
*Editable region



The locked region can only be modified on your Master template, and any changes made here will be reflected on all your sub pages.

The editable region is where you put all your actual content on each individual page. The editable region is not affected by changes on the master template or any of the sub pages.

How to Use Dreamweaver Templates:

Using your templates is easy. Whenever you want to create a new web page for your site, simply:

1. Click on -> File -> New
2. Then in the New window click the -> Templates tab
3. Select your site from the list on the left hand side
4. Then Select the template you want to use from the list on the right hand side

And voila! You've just created a new page that will be updated with any change made to the master template.

'Til the next tutorial!