Seamlessly integrate Photoshop CS and Dreamweaver MX to create dynamic Web sites with this full-color guide. Get step-by-step instruction on concepts using a project-based approach and immediately attain tangible results. Practical instruction coupled with design theory teach you to create functional Web sites that are well-designed and aesthetically pleasing as well.

Create a stunning Web site - without programming - using the industry’s most popular tools! Full-color instruction designed to deliver tangible results. Communicate a clear message with professional, integrative design using the world’s most popular Web design combination - Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Dreamweaver. Follow along as expert Colin Smith shows you how to build Web sites that are both well-designed and highly functional. Take standard Web page elements - such as navigation bars and content areas - and create a unique look based on the needs of your client, and the boundless capacity of your own imagination. With a balance of technical instruction and Web design theory, this one-of-a-kind guide will show you how to create visually appealing and technically effective professional Web sites.

Colin Smith (Laguna Niguel, CA) is an Author/Trainer and an award winning Graphic Designer who has caused a stir in the design community with his stunning photorealistic illustrations composed entirely in Photoshop.

Create a stunning Web site--without programming--using the Industry?s most popular tools! Full-color instruction designed to deliver tangible results.

Communicate a clear message with professional, integrative design using the world?s most popular Web design combination--Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Dreamweaver. Follow along as expert Colin Smith shows you how to build Web sites that are both well-designed and highly functional. Take standard Web page elements--such as navigation bars and content areas--and create a unique look based on the needs of your client, and the boundless capacity of your own imagination. With a balance of technical instruction and Web design theory, this one-of-a-kind guide will show you how to create visually appealing and technically effective professional Web sites.

Create a stunning Web site--without programming--using the Industry’s most popular tools! Full-color instruction designed to deliver tangible results.

Communicate a clear message with professional, integrative design using the world’s most popular Web design combination--Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Dreamweaver. Follow along as expert Colin Smith shows you how to build Web sites that are both well-designed and highly functional. Take standard Web page elements--such as navigation bars and content areas--and create a unique look based on the needs of your client, and the boundless capacity of your own imagination. With a balance of technical instruction and Web design theory, this one-of-a-kind guide will show you how to create visually appealing and technically effective professional Web sites.

Create a stunning Web site--without programming--using the Industry’s most popular tools! Full-color instruction designed to deliver tangible results.

Communicate a clear message with professional, integrative design using the world’s most popular Web design combination--Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Dreamweaver. Follow along as expert Colin Smith shows you how to build Web sites that are both well-designed and highly functional. Take standard Web page elements--such as navigation bars and content areas--and create a unique look based on the needs of your client, and the boundless capacity of your own imagination. With a balance of technical instruction and Web design theory, this one-of-a-kind guide will show you how to create visually appealing and technically effective professional Web sites.

Disappointing
This book should be taken out of print if it hasn’t already, it has some useful points but is sooo outdated that it might as well be used as a door stop because the information is much too old and based on much older versions of the software which has evolved beyond the book.
Either update the book, which may have been relevant when first published, or do buyers a favor and upload the stock to the second hand books market.

Too Confusing To Follow
The author definitely knows his stuff but does a horrible job relaying it to the reader. He often has you follow steps for creating part of your website and abruptly ends with no final results and suddenly starts a new topic.
This book has some good elements for a reference book, but if you’re new to web design and looking for a set-by-step book to build a site in Photoshop and Dreamweaver - this is not the book you want.

This book can give a good solid base to web design beginners!
I came across this book after having built three full functioning websites by self-teaching and muddling through the technical difficulties of Dreamweaver. I was already good at Photoshop, by the way, and a graphic designer.

However the more sites I’ve built, the less confident I was. I felt like I was standing on a non-solid and very shaky ground of technical knowledge in web design. There were things I knew very well, and simple things that I didn’t know at all.

So I came across this book "Photoshop and Dreaweaver Integration". Sounded good, so I decided to give it a shot. At the time, this book was already two years old. And I had known before starting that it would only cover the laying-out-by-tables method. There was nothing about layout-by-CSS method, which is growing very strong in these days.

I’ve had gone through the book page by page carefully. I didn’t follow the suggestions of the author trying to design your own website while following the technical guides of the book. Instead I tried to do exactly what the author did in the book. The reason for this is that I just wanted to learn the technical skills. I wanted to know exactly how to do what the author did. I didn’t want the design and aesthetic problems get into my way before I got a solid technical skill base. And I was a designer, I wouldn’t have to worry that I couldn’t create.

So the result of going through the book page by page, twice, is that now I feel very confident as a beginner. The book covers everything that a beginner needs to know: from planning, drafting, make a comprehensive sketch in Photoshop, to transfer it to ImageReady, add button and rollovers, and then transfer again to Dreaweaver, where you can build your template page, build the whole site, add E-commerce and interactive functions, and finding a hosting service.

Many of these things I had already known about, but I still went through them with the book anyway, because then I could see the whole process.

Of course there’s a lot ahead for me to learn, like laying out with CSS, but I’m not anxious anymore about the shaky ground that I once stood on.

I hope the author will update the book with new knowledge. But for now it is still a good book for starters.

Fantastic Book
I have very little knowledge on web design, the last page I built was with FrontPage 2000 and it was as basic and boring as possible. After going through this book I have made drastic improvements to the quality of my site and my comfort level with Dreamweaver has increased immensely!

If you are new to web design and want to learn how to create a web site from a basic picture all the way to getting the site uploaded to your host, this is the book for you.

This is the one for me...
This book is perfect for those of us just starting out in web page creation. The book walks you through all the steps used in Photoshop, and then continues with the Dreamweaver portion. I had actually purchased several other books on the topic, but quickly dropped them for this one due to its step-by-step explanations.

Great Starter Book for Photoshop and Dreamweaver Fans!
This book was a great starter and just want I needed. It has full color photos which provide very helpful information about some best design pratices to use. This book requires some working knowledge of using Photoshop, not recommended for total newbee. Tells how to use roll overs, tables. Gives a good tutorial of creating website from start to finish in Adobe and then transfers to Dreamweaver.

Wow, I sure needed this book...
I couldn’t put this book down. Super easy to read. My struggle with slices in Photoshop and tables with Dreamweaver are over. In just two days I was able to use my new found knowledge to design and publish my first photoshop designed website. The tutorials are well laid out and fun to follow. Thanks Colin, great job!

Good starting point for print designers getting into web
If you are a seasoned graphic designer wishing to be able to create web pages as well print design, this book may be a good place to start. Designers fluent in Adobe Photoshop should have no problem creating the buttons, backgrounds, and other visual elements for the web pages you will create with this book. It’s a totally different approach to creating a web site that I found pretty interesting--as in planning to make my own thumbnails and comp page for an upcoming project. I suspect this is a more intuitive way for designers to approach web design. Smith’s approach is more that of a designer than a programmer. As a graphic designer myself who moved into web design a few years ago, I find Smith’s approach more natural. The layout is straightforward and fairly easy to use.

Even if you are not a print graphic designer, I do want to point out that Smith’s method of creating thumbnails and a comp page are extremely valuable anytime you are creating a web site for someone besides yourself. Comp pages allow your client, boss, or committee to see your creative ideas for the site BEFORE a huge amount of time is spent in creating a whole web site. Print designers are used to using comps for projects, it’s a wise practice for web design as well.

Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration (One-Off)

It didnt have everything that I wanted but it was a pretty good book overall. He showed some great photoshop & dremaweaver techniques that opens up some doors and really got me thinking.

Please Colin Book or dvd 2 that goes into Liquid sites in depth. It would be great if you took the site you made in book 1
and turned that into a liquid site from start to finish
for more advanced users.

I would buy that in a second and I’m sure everyone who bought
book one would too.

Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration (One-Off)
Who is he kidding make professional websites that blow away the competition? LOL

If you want to make pro websites that blow away the competition, you are not going to be able to do in a few hours with his products. After I watched his DVD, he lead me on saying his book would show me exactly how to make a liquid site which it did not. There were only a few vague paragraphs on liquid sites but it did not apply to the project the whole course covered which was ridiculous. I ended up with a webpage that sort of looked cool but was half done IMHO and was not was not liquid like he insinuated. I emailed him my specific needs and he mislead me

I even emailed him and offered to pay him to help me get the most of his book and DVD. He was very rude and did not stand by his product.

You want make a pro site learn HTML or take a real dreamweaver course by someone who really knows what’s going on.

Thumbs down!

I created my website in 1 day after reading this book ... you can too!
Before reading this book, I was an intermediate Photoshop user and had never used Dreamweaver before. I really didn’t expect that I could create my own website in one day, after reading only one book! (After all, isn’t creating a website meant to be a complicated process?!) But that’s what I did. And you can too!

This book was so easy to follow - with a step-by-step guide so that you could create your own website while reading the book.

I really couldn’t have asked for more, because it gave me all the information I needed to create my website and I haven’t needed to consult any other books on website design.

I’m so glad I didn’t have to wade through dud books before I read this one - such a time saver!

Lots of good ideas in a terrible book
This book is confusing, frustrating, and, ultimately, insulting to the reader. Insulting because the cost of the book ($40) implies some kind of quality but the production of the book implies only sloppiness and ineptitude.

Don’t get me wrong. The author, Colin Smith, clearly knows a lot about Photoshop and Dreamweaver. What he doesn’t know about, or is too lazy to learn, is how to write a worthwhile book on those subjects.

His writing is confusing, murky, and inconsistent, forcing the reader time and again to intepret his meaning (or simply give up). Often, steps are presented out of order, so the reader can eventually figure out what he meant by flipping back and forth. It’s difficult to tell whether he is discussing a concept or presenting a procedure. The text often does not match the graphics. The graphics are in color but are poorly chosen and, often, at odds with the text.

Smith leaves out steps in some cases. Other times, he’ll put cram several steps into one numbered paragraph. Sometimes he is crystal clear in his descriptions, other times he writes like someone who can’t be bothered to finish his sentences.

Jeff Keyser is listed as the technical editor of this mess of a book. I’m sure he shares some of the blame. It’s hard to see exactly what he was doing as an editor.

Here’s some specific examples of the sloppiness of this book’s production:

Chapter 1, page 12 -- a sort of form of some kind is thrown in at the end of the chapter with no explanation. What is this form for? What does it represent? How does it relate to the previous discussion? Who knows?

Chapter 2 -- at least two instances where procedures are presented using bullets instead of numbers (as they are in the rest of the book).

Chapter 3, page 38 -- at some point in this procedure, the background is filled (you can tell by the graphics) but that’s never mentioned in the text.

Chapter 3, page 56 -- "Using the techniques learned so far, finish up the web page." Huh? How about a little help? We suddenly go from very detailed instruction to a "sink or swim" approach. Disconcerting to say the least.

Chapter 4 -- OMG! Smith sunddenly switches to a different layout for the critical task of slicing! We painstakingly went through the process of creating a particular top-navigation design in chapter 3 and now he switches to a side-navigation design. Amazingly, he’s forgotten that guides were already added back in chapter 3, so he runs us through that again (but without enough detail to actually do the job). Then he has us create slices from the guides, stating "the zones are now nicely sliced in the top navigation design." No they aren’t! He does show us one picture of the sliced top-nav design, but the picture is so small it’s hard to make out the sliced areas. Ultimately, by the way, the sliced areas in this picture (Figure 4-12B) don’t match the slices when we get into Dreamweaver in Chapter 6.

Chapter 5 -- now we revert back to the top-nav design. I guess that’s a good thing. On page 110 he shows us how to add hyperlinks - something we already did on page 90 in chapter 4.

Chapter 9 -- "Creating a Sliding Animation." This section is totally incomprehensible. I defy anyone to figure out what Smith is talking about.

I was also disappointed there wasn’t more discussion about ImageReady.

On a positive note, there are some very good techniques presented here. I enjoyed learning how to make cool buttons, add depth to the heading area, make rollover effects, and how to optimize images.

Strangely enough, if you can get through this book with committing suicide or throwing it out the window, you will gain a knowledge of the overall workflow going from Photoshop to Dreamweaver and you will learn some valuable techniques. One only wishes a better author and editor had done the job.

Good for the basics
I found this book highly valuable for Photoshop/Image Ready. However, it is proof positive that a person can figure out Dreamweaver on her own.

Colin Smith gives very clear direction. The exception is that the project he chooses to demonstrate is quite dark and is not as effective in print as it is online. I found myself referring to the web site when the printed colors were too dark to decipher the lesson.

Like another reviewer, I would have preferred more detailed information on advanced technique. Smith’s web sites give great tutorials, but they don’t make up for the lack of information in terms of advanced updates.

A Must Have For Any Web Designer
A wonderful book that covers all sections in great detail. It starts off at the "thinking" phase of a design with a description of color theory and then instantly you are getting some real world examples. Throughout the book you will find examples of sites that illustrate the chosen topic. I like the that any skill level can pick up this book and feel comfortable with the knowledge they pick up while at the same time a pro can benefit from this book as well. Colin’s unique writing style shines in this book, it isn’t just a "boring manual", and the results are instantly noticed once you complete a chapter. One of my favorite chapters explains "CSS" and then walks you through the steps needed in Dreamweaver to create very powerful designs. Another great section in this book is the history of web design and how it has evolved. I will be recommending this book to all of my fellow web designer friends, and look forward to future releases by Colin.

Just a Little Integration
The most widely used advanced software for creating web pages is Macromedia’s Dreamweaver. Similarly, the most widely used graphics software is Adobe’s Photoshop. One component of Photoshop that aids in creating web sites is Image Ready. Many people creating websites integrate Photoshop’s output with Dreamweaver to make the best possible websites. But since there is no direct interface between the two, the site maker often encounters significant problems. It is this situation that this book aims at improving. (This problem may lessen with the proposed merger of Macromedia and Adobe.)

The author’s method is to take a project, the creation of a web page, and follow it through the process from creation to completion. He suggests that if the reader has a similar project he can follow along with the book to create that project. Along the way, he offers additional tips on using the two pieces of software and finishes up with a few applications not covered in the project.

I followed along with a project of my own, trying to create and insert some new navigation buttons into my website. I had actually created buttons before, but I thought I would use Smith’s method to make sure he covered all the steps.

The results were frustrating, primarily because Smith’s project is relatively simple and mine slightly more complex, and because Smith provided no information on using some of the more advanced features of the software. For example, in my project my buttons were to have names on top of them and to feature a rollover effect, where the buttons would change color. Experienced users of Photoshop will recognize that this requires use of the type tool and styles. There was no discussion of the type tool and little discussion of styles. There certainly was no indication that once a style was created, it could be used again by saving it in a styles window. When it came to creating the rollover effect I had to read the section eight or nine times to understand the instruction, and then I only understood it because I went back to several other references.

Another problem I faced was that I was looking to upgrade an existing page. This meant that after I was finished constructing my project in Photoshop, I had to paste the HTML created by Photoshop into the existing page in Dreamweaver and move the new buttons to the Dreamweaver site. I found no help in the book for this task, which I would think would be fairly common for people upgrading their site.

I noticed that the book did briefly cover creating a website in Photoshop. I have found it extremely useful to create a new website this way, and to then import it into Dreamweaver. There the site can be personalized and updated. There was no mention of how this could be done in the book.

I note that the book used Photoshop CS and Dreamweaver MX 2004 for its software. They have been upgraded to Photoshop CS2 and Dreamweaver 8, but the techniques covered in this book are probably still applicable.

In summery, if you want to create a basic site using Photoshop as your main design tool, and then add some enhancements in Dreamweaver, this book will prove helpful. But you probably will have to refer to other references if you want to construct a more complex site.

If you dont believe the reviews, visit my site!
I just started designing webpages back in May 2005 (its now Sept 2005).. I did alot of online research to design my first website using Dreamweaver. I sell funny t shirts and wanted to sell online and wanted to learn how to make my own website instead of paying someone else to do it.. I like things my way and so doing it myself would give me that freedom! Just from online research I was able to create an entire website that actually works and sells.. My site was lacking certain updated features and designs and although it worked, it wasnt exactly what I wanted.. I heard about designing webpages using Photoshop which led me here to look for a book.. This is the only book I could find that explains designing in photoshop and then transferring your designs into Dreamweaver.. Since I already knew how to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver this was the book for me!

You dont need to be a master at photoshop to understand this book although you must have some basic knowledge of it.. (I recommend Classroom in a Book for Photoshop if you know nothing about it!) You dont need to know Dreamweaver either to understand it.. The book walks you through designing your site in easy to understand words utilizing examples that you can stray from without getting lost.. In other words you can make your own site instead of creating the same thing the author is doing, but with your own personal touches.. Slicing is covered pretty well in the book, but I must admit it took me 3 tries to succesfully slice my first webpage.. (Those stray slices will complicate things so follow the book closely!) After I finally grasped slicing things fell into place.. The book also shows you how to do more advanced things like rollovers, animations, and even pop-up windows which will come in handy for me so I can show enlarged images of my shirts! Anyhow you can take these reviews however you want to, but the proof is in the pudding! Check out my site www.absurdatees.com and see this book in action!

Not for beginners
This book is great, but definitely not for beginners. It teaches more the concepts of web design, rather than actually ’how to’. I think if you have a really good working knowledge of Photoshop and Dreamweaver this book would polish off your skills well, as it teaches you how to set out a page, use colours, then basically effectively move this over to Dreamweaver. If you are new to Photoshop this book will quickly end up on a shelf gathering dust for a while. I’ve given this book 3 stars as it offered little help to me (and I’m trying to learn Photoshop), but it may be a good ’icing on the cake’ for someone who can already use the software.

Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration
It is one of the best reference books I purchased in using Photoshop and Dreamweaver. The flow of the book makes it easy to understand.

Not for beginners
This book is great, but definitely not for beginners. It teaches more the concepts of web design, rather than actually ’how to’. I think if you have a really good working knowledge of Photoshop and Dreamweaver this book would polish off your skills well, as it teaches you how to set out a page, use colours, then basically effectively move this over to Dreamweaver. If you are new to Photoshop this book will quickly end up on a shelf gathering dust for a while. I’ve given this book 3 stars as it offered little help to me (and I’m trying to learn Photoshop), but it may be a good ’icing on the cake’ for someone who can already use the software.

Author has great knowledge of both products
Prior to reading this book, I was familiar with its author, Colin Smith, from the PhotoshopCafe.com and some of his other books. He did not disappoint me with this book.

I had been looking for some time for a book that addressed both Adobe’s Photoshop and Macromedia’s Dreamweaver in one book. Normally, I develop the graphical part of the website in Photoshop, later to bring it into Dreamweaver to add the functionality. However, I had never found one book that had an author that understood both products and was able to explain them clearly. Smith did just that in this book.

When I read the book, I was amazing at the volume of good information he was able to squeeze into only 308 pages. The examples were right on target and the full color images mirrored exactly what I saw on my own computer screen. What’s more is that Smith not only teaches you the features of these products, but he also teaches good, solid design methods as well.

I found that certain chapters were extremely helpful to me personally. In Chapter 2, Smith discusses not only how to use the color editing capabilities of Photoshop, but perhaps more importantly, he discusses some of the theory behind using color. I’ve always thought I was somewhat "color impaired" when it came to selecting and manipulating colors in Photoshop. Now, however, my confidence has been renewed in this area.

Chapter 7 will also be particularly helpful for those web designers who are moving away from tables and more towards using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to format their pages. Smith explains the advantages of using CSS within Dreamweaver to streamline your processes and to develop more uniformity of the pages within your website.

This book also covered some areas which I was particularly interested such as how to create animated GIFs (Chapter 9), creating forms (Chapter 10), integrating simple ecommerce with PayPal (Chapter 10) and using iframes (Chapter 11). Chapter 12 may be a help to beginners because it explains how to acquire hosting, setup a domain and upload the web pages from Dreamweaver to the new website.

Finally, a Book That Takes The Mystery Out of High Quality Web Design.
If you’ve been searching for the "How To" scoop on using Photoshop with a web development application, in this case Dreamweaver, look no further. Using a series of practical and well thought out examples Colin Smith takes you on a start to finish tour of website development that anyone with a beginning-intermediate level of Photoshop/Dreamweaver experience can follow. Recognizing the potential this book provides for making high impact/quality websites I worked through the book with the objective of porting an existing clients website into my "practice" development exercise. The end result is a website that I’m extremely proud of and an already happy client that’s even happier. If you’re intimidated by web development tools such as templates and cascading style sheets, fear no more. Colin has a gift for taking the mystery and techno-babble out of a topic and replacing it with well documented/illustrated easy to follow step-by-step instruction. This book is a must-have for anyone wanting take their web design skills from plain-vanilla to high-impact.

No Dancing Teddy Bears - Just Good Design
This is an awesome resource for anyone who is serious about building a web site. Colin teaches the basics and then gets into the more advanced techniques for web design, integrating two of the industry’s leading web-building programs, Photoshop and Dreamweaver. As always Colin writes in a smooth easy-to-understand manner, carefully explaining each tool and technique.

Another great thing about this book is that it teaches "good" web design, as opposed to flashy, fancy, dancing teddy bears. You learn how to set up your page from header to content. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to design a web site.

Good Discussion of Both Products
These two packages are hands down the first choice among professionals for web design. Photoshop is easily the most popular image editing and creation application, and has enjoyed the unrivaled position at the top of the design industry for years. Dreamweaver is the favored took for taking all these beautiful graphics and arranging them for display on the web.

This is about a two (maybe three) day book, if you already have some knowledge of Photoshop. Add another day or two if you do not. One really strong point in the book is its concern with things like how fast the web page loads. So many earlier web sites were so extensively graphics oriented that people got tired of waiting for them to load. The site being designed in the book uses small but carefully designed graphics to add eye appeal.