April 10, 2012
In this tutorial, you will learn how to add Google's Web Fonts to a Dreamweaver webpage without using Code View.
When creating websites and webpages to publish online, developers are forced to work with a very limited number of fonts that are common on all computer operating systems. Google has created another excellent free service they call Web Fonts to alleviate this limiting factor for website developers. This software allows your Dreamweaver website to link with their CSS file to display a given Web Font.
For demonstration purposes, we will show you how to implement the Web Font " Great Vibes ". The steps described in this Dreamweaver tutorial can be used for any of Google's 500-plus Web Fonts.
This stuff can be tricky! If you're having trouble and would like some professional assistance give us a call at (541) 912-9300 or contact us.
Contact Us Today!To begin, we must open an existing webpage or create a new one in Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5. Once the page has been created and saved, click over to Google's Web Fonts. Click the button at center "Start choosing fonts," and select on that you would like to use! For this tutorial, the example used will be the first font displayed, "Great Vibes."
After identifying the Google Web Font to use, click the "Quick-use" link. In this new page, you can select a few styling options listed with checkboxes. Scroll down to the blue box titled "3. Add this code to your website:" and select the "Standard" tab. You will see a URL written out inside one line of code. Highlight and copy the URL only; *any extra characters or missing ones will cause failure.
Return to your Dreamweaver webpage and open the CSS Styles Panel. At the bottom of this panel are icon buttons, the one to select is a link icon with the hover text "Attach Style Sheet." This button will open a window titled "Attach External Style Sheet."
Place your cursor in the top text field named "File/URL" and paste the URL from Google Web Fonts.
There is one coding error that Dreamweaver automatically adds to the URL that you paste, it adds ".css" to the end of the URL which causes failure. To correct this, open the menu View and check Head Content; this will display the Head Content Panel above Dreamweaver's Design View.
Here you will see a series of icon buttons, the last of which it a link-over-sheet icon, select this and look to the bottom Properties Panel to view its content.
Now we can remove the last four characters ".css" from the URL. Click out of the Properties Panel and save.
To make use of this newly linked Web Font, make a CSS rule that adds this font to the content of your Dreamweaver website. On the individual Google Web Fonts pages, there are examples of each specific Web Font's name for use in CSS rules.
Create or edit a CSS rule in your website's appropriate CSS file and set font-family to the name listed at the bottom of that Google Web Font page.
Save the webpage that you have edited and open it in a web browser. Confirm that your content that has been selected with a CSS rule to make use of the Web Font chosen.
Dreamweaver will only display the content with a Web Font in Live View and only if your is online at that time.
In many cases, web designers will use an image of text on their website to get the look just right. Visually, this is no problem, but there are some drawbacks; load-time for images is a major factor as well as SEO. Search Engine Optimization is an effort to impact how search engines, like Google, rank websites. The use of headings, a title, a meta description, links, and many other factors effect search engine results page ranking. Using text instead of images of text is better in the eyes of SEO.
