Page 1 of 3 Valentine's Day is one of my favorite holidays of the year. It's fanciful and lighthearted, and I don't feel the pressure of the big holidays like Christmas or Easter. I can daydream about a romantic rendezvous, such as a gondola journey through the canals of Venice on a moonlit night. Though I can't make that a reality, I can pretend while exploring the latest CMX JumpStart: Venice.
Like all CMX JumpStarts, Venice is based on Web standards with valid CSS2.1 and XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup, and it passes WAI and 508 accessibility checkpoints. The package includes a three-column home page and a two-column form page. Both layouts feature fixed-width, equal height columns with rounded corners. There are two style sheets, one for screen and one for print, eleven bundled tutorials, and an editable source PNG. We've even created a video to show you an overview of the features and design of Venice.
For subscribers who wish to download the Venice files, please go to Zoe Gillenwater's article.
Image 1: The Venice CMX JumpStart home page. Click the
image above to see a larger view. You can see the form page later in this article.
CMX tries to add something special to each of the JumpStarts, and Venice continues the tradition. Partner Kim Dudley, a Freehand expert, created the gorgeous design, and new partner Linda Rathgeber, author of many popular Fireworks books such as Playing with Fire, organized the layouts in one source PNG according to best practices. You'll learn how to share assets across frames, and organize your graphics for maximum efficiency.
Now let's look at what the Venice CMX JumpStart package includes. We'll then look at why its Web standards construction is important. We'll look at how easy it is to customize the design so that it is completely unique, and show you an example of a site created from modified Venice pages. Finally, we'll let you know how you can make the Venice CMX JumpStart your own.
First things first: what do you get when you purchase Venice for $29.99, or get it free as a subscriber to CMX?
Now let's look at what the Venice bundle includes:
Note: While all of the pages and files included will work in any version of Dreamweaver, or any other HTML editor, the extension to install the design into the New Document window will only work in Dreamweaver MX 2004.
Tip: There are no restrictions on the number of sites for which you may use the Venice layout. Apply it over and over again to create unique pages: you are limited only by the boundaries of your imagination.
For those of you who want to understand how Venice was built, the package comes bundled with all the tutorials you'll need to desconstruct it. Additionally, Jim Babbage's tutorial covers masking part of an image, a graphics technique you'll use in the source PNG.
In addition to the bundled tutorials, Venice comes with specific directions on how to modify its two and three column pages. There is documentation for the following techniques:
Note: Venice is the sixth in our series of CMX JumpStarts
Dreamweaver templates. We will continue to diversify our features and layouts
so that you will always be able to find a design to fit your needs. Venice is
a three and two equal-height, rounded-corner column design, but perhaps you
would like to also look at these JumpStarts:
CMX
JumpStart Paris is a two column fixed-width layout with the popular tab
navigation feature, and it includes a starter page and a form page.
CMX
JumpStart Seattle has a home page with four floated boxes, and two column,
fixed-width inner and form pages that include accessible, list-formatted navigation.
CMX
JumpStart Aspen is a three column liquid-width design that includes floats,
fixed and absolute positioning, background positioning, styled lists, and a
base page and a form page.
CMX
JumpStart Northpole was our free 2004 holiday gift to the web community.
It is a two column, fixed-width design that uses clever deployment of background
images in both the navigational elements and the content areas of the design.
The images make use of the CMX black line art series for Fireworks.
CMX
JumpStart Liverpool includes a two-column fixed-width layout with navigation
on the left and a main content section on the right. There is also a little
twist to the content area: its lower section is split into two columns, while
the upper section spans across both of these columns. Additionally, Liverpool
includes an authentication system based on access levels, and provides files
for ColdFusion, PHP, ASP, and .NET versions.
You can see that the package includes everything you need to get you started, as well as to turn the Venice CMX JumpStart into a rich CSS learning experience. You probably have other questions, however. For instance, why are the Web standards components of this layout so important, and why should you care enough to use them in your own pages? Let's examine those questions now.
Keywords
design, CSS2, CSS, XHTML, WAI, 508, CMX JumpStarts, Venice JumpStart, CMX layouts, Web standards, template, positioning, CSS-P, lists, list buttons, fieldsets, acessible forms, slicing, slice, wrapper, div, float, two column, 2 column, three column, 3 column, background images, valid XHTML, valid CSS, rounded corners, masking
