So far in the tutorial series of building a website in Dreamweaver, I’ve focused a lot on the Template including the header and footer elements but now I want to take a bit of time and look at the content area of a website. 

In order to understand how to build a website properly, you first have to understand some basics of Search Engine Optimization, or maybe you have to understand some basics of website publishing to be good at SEO work but either way, publishing web content and optimizing your web pages is interconnected.

A web page needs a specific structure, just like a book needs chapters and paragraphs so does a web page. Some people forget the first real use of the web was for academic papers, today the structure of a web document is still very connected to it’s origins and there are some pretty basic tags used to format pages. Let’s take a look at the basic building blocks of a web page and how to use them properly before we begin placing text in our documents.

Headings

xHTML allows for up to six headings on a page, each should be used in a hierarchal structure starting with the most important and proceeding to the lowest value.

• <h1> – There should only every be one <h1> tag on a web page, the level one heading is most often also the title of the document and is extremely important both in standardization practices and search engine optimization
• <h2> … <h6> – Used as hierarchal structure tags, the lower headings are used to identify the importance of each level of the document. <h2> contains content more important than <h3> for example

thisismyurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/format.jpg" rel="lightbox[roadtrip]">Take a bit of time and format the text using only the text format tool on your Properties toolbar. This will allow you to apply <p> and <h1> … <h6> tags to your Lorem Ipsum text.

Once you’ve got the hang of adding some <p> and <h1>, <h2> tags to your document, try adding an unordered list (<ul>) and some list items (<li>) to your page. Notice that Dreamweaver automatically creates the list items for you in an ordered or unordered list.

Now that you have an understanding of how to create paragraphs, headings and lists for your web page content take a bit of time and add real text to your website pages for all for of the pages. Before you add anything however, as yourself where the content belongs and try to understand that every element needs to belong to a document hierarchy.