Website Design Articles :: Useful Tools

Dreamweaver Extensions

For Dreamweaver developers, Rabi's Dreamweaver Extensions has a number of tools to increase your productivity. A few are listed below.

Advanced Email - This extension will help you create an email link with Subject, Carbon Copy, Blind Carbon Copy and Body text in an email link.

Banner Image Builder - This Extension creates a sequence of Images that change at specified intervals. Each Image can have its unique link and can also be used to create Animated JPEG, by assigning a sequence of JPEGs. On IE browsers, the images change with an optional random transition effect.

Country / States / Region / City Codes - inserts a list of Countries / States / Region or City in a drop down list. Available for all countries or separate regions for the UK, Ireland, US, India, Germany, France, Brazil & Argentina.

Meta Tag Generator - META Tags are HTML tags which provide information that describes the content of the webpages a user will be viewing. Search engines have recognized that website owners and administrators can use this resource to control their positioning and descriptions in search engine results. Many search engines have now incorporated reading META tags as part of their indexing formulas. This object helps creating all such tags under one option.

Special Characters - This Object will insert special characters like ®©¼÷»é and more. This also has a enhanced 'space insert' where you can enter number of space tag to be inserted. To use this, click on the icon in Objects window, select the special character and click OK.

Form Builder - provides ready-made list boxes for Country Codes, Gender, Marital Status, Age Group, Date of Birth, Education, Occupation and Income. Useful for collecting information for User Accounts, Credit Cards and so on.

This package contains 3 form builders. Two for General Purpose Form and another for Credit Card Info and also includes the country codes drop down which is available as a separate extension.

Add to Favorites - Add a button or link in the page that prompts visitors to add your page to their favorites. If they confirm, your page is automatically added to their Favorites. For the time being, this works only on Internet Explorer and will be ignored by Netscape. So there is no harm.

Print this Page - Lots of your visitors don't know how to print your great pages. Here is a neat extension to give a Print link with Text, Button or an Image Check this out (you can cancel when prompted for Print)

Date Stamp - inserts the system date and time, or if needed, inserts the Javascript inside the page, to dynamically change the 'date last updated'.

This extension has options to set the Date and Time in 9 different formats.

Text Link - Whenever you move your mouse over images with the Alt attribute specified, a small window of text or tooltip pops up. Now you can add this nifty feature to text links in your document as well. On Netscape the tool tip will be ignored.

News Ticker - Create a Dynamic News Ticker with this Extension. It accepts any external Text / HTML file for content. But Works only in IE browsers. Netscape will ignore this.

Menu Builder - With this tool you will be able to create cross-browser live pop-up menus within minutes. Menu Builder prompts you for the menu's entries and links and then generates two pieces of code: an HTML segment for your document's BODY portion, and a simple script for the HEAD zone.

Japan Interface also has a couple of useful extensions
Lorem and More - indispensible when creating new sites while awaiting copy from the client.

Lorem and more offers you the choice of traditional Lorem ipsum, a bit of genuine Cicero, random corporate nonsense, and for romantics — Sonnet 116 by Shakespeare. It also offers a choice of format — paragraphs, continuous text, ordered and unordered lists, and in the case of Shakespeare, formally laid out as a sonnnet.

Compatible with Dreamweaver 4, MX, MX 2004 & DW8.

Smart Link - converts an existing link so that the target page opens in a new browser window. It works in a similar way to the Dreamweaver Open Browser Window behavior, or using target="_blank", but gives you far more control over its look and position.

Although it uses JavaScript, it is smart enough to work even if JavaScript is disabled (by opening the page in the same window) — keeping your site accessible to everyone, and far more user-friendly than a link that doesn't work at all.

It also has the advantage of keeping your pages valid, unlike target="_blank" which has been deprecated by the W3C. For full details, read the Smart Link help file.

Compatible with Dreamweaver 4, MX, MX 2004 & DW8.