If you've ever designed a website with more than a handful of navigation points, you may have found it frustrating and time consuming to have to edit each page individually when you want to change a link. And, if you decide you want to change the overall look of the website, the task may seem way too daunting. You might have decided to put it off to some unknown future day when you have the free time to indulge in such experimentation (perhaps retirement?).
Fortunately, Macromedia's Dreamweaver has a quick and simple solution – the library item. Dreamweaver is a powerful program for website design. Many people work with it for years without discovering some of its time-saving tools. The library item is one such tool.
What does it do?
The Library item allows you to share graphics, navigation links to other parts of the website or other sites entirely, and text among a number of pages. If you look at the navigation below, or the J&A logo and graphics above, you are looking at "library items."
Looking below, all the navigation tabs from "about j&a" to "j&a news" are all incorporated into one editable library item. If later we decided we wanted to do away with "samples of our work" and replace it with "portfolio" we could make the change right in the library item, rather than having to edit all 50 or so webpages.
How to create a library item
After you have created your graphics, links, text or whatever elements you want to combine into the shared library item, you simply will highlight them all. One limitation with Dreamweaver's library item is all the elements must be a contiguous group (all adjacent to each other).
