Dreamweaver Basics

Tip #18

What is Fireworks?

Fireworks is a graphic program sold by Macromedia, the company that sells Dreamweaver. You can think of it as a competitor with Photoshop (the BIG industry standard as the single most commonly found graphic program) and things such as Paint Shop Pro. The main reason I address Fireworks in this Dreamweaver class is that people will sometimes purchase Dreamweaver bundled with Fireworks.

Photoshop is very popular at least on the University of Arizona campus, and there are many commercial books, videos, and sources of classes about how to use Photoshop, because it is so commonly used. Photoshop is a more expensive program (even with educational discounts) than Fireworks. Furthermore, Photoshop is a graphic program that can be used by both people creating graphics for print as well as graphics for the web, and (in my opinion) many of the features available in the program are more aimed at the print world. Fireworks, by contrast, was really intended as a program to create images for the web, much more than images for print.

On the class CD there is a videoclip related to Fireworks basics, primarily showing how to convert a photo to a web image and a logo/clipart image to a web image. At its simpliest level, this is how Fireworks can be used, and at least 85% of the time I use a graphic program, it is only to convert existing images into a web format, as I did to turn this photo into a web graphic:
example of photograph

However, Fireworks could be used to create your own buttons, similar to this button:
about us button example.

Yet other examples might be to create a collage of photos with text, or combine an existing logo with other shapes and text---to make headers:
example photo collage

header example

Depending on your artistic skills, you could learn to create such graphics fairly quickly. So Fireworks can be used to create images that are used on your website.

Another way that Fireworks can be use is to take an existing art work/graphic such as is shown here:
example of large complex image used for first page of website
and then to "slice" that image into parts, assigning parts to different web pages. Fireworks lets you take an existing image, add pop up menus as those shown in cals.arizona.edu/employees, or hotspots for parts of the entire image, and then Fireworks actually will produce the necessary HTML code to make that initial page. (Note: Fireworks was not used to create this initial page; that was created in Illustrator, the drawing program used by our graphic artist.) If you used Fireworks to create the "initial" page, then you would use Dreamweaver only to add metatags (which we are covering in Lesson 6) or to create all of those textual content pages that have to go with the site.

These three uses of Fireworks

  • convert existing images into JPEG or GIF files for the web
  • create relatively simply new images as in buttons or headers
  • take a single, more-complex image and turn it into a front page
are quite different and obviously take different skills.

These tips are created as part of a class on Dreamweaver Basics.