Style

An effective website has a distinctive appearance that sets it apart from others. An important part of coming up with a distinctive "look and feel" is the initial planning that goes into its creation. Design considerations are as important as any content or layout planning that you will do if you’re going to create a site that is both compelling and generates enough interest to bring your audience back for return visits. Not everyone has a natural talent for design so a good way to approach this initial planning stage is to surf the Internet and find sites that you find visually appealing. Give some thought to why you find them appealing. How does the designer use color, shape, balance, and text to engage their audience? What is it that sets this website apart from others? With enough observation you will probably notice that originality in design is a very rare commodity.  There is very little that is truly "new" as design, like many other aspects of modern life, tends to follow a cyclical pattern and borrows heavily from ideas that came before it.  A good design bucks the trend. With this in mind use other websites to inspire you and avoid "borrowing" the ideas of others if at all possible.  

Another thing to keep in mind is that a website is only boring if you let it be. Don’t make the mistake of believing that only exciting companies can have exciting websites. A website has to sell, both literally and figuratively, and whether it be a design for a high profile advertising agency or a local plumbing company makes little difference.  

With these ideas in mind we will now look at Firework’s Style Panel. The Style Panel allows us to easily catalog and automate the creation of web pages with any number of unique appearance settings for text and shapes. It removes much of the tedious work that goes into creating distinctive web sites.

Before we can discuss the Style Panel we must look at the ways that Fireworks handles Text, Fills, Strokes, and Effects.

Fireworks allows you to place text within your document through the use of its Text Tool.  If you select the Text Tool from your Toolbox and place your cursor within the Document Window you will find that it has changed from an arrow to an I bar. If you click on your document with the Text Tool Cursor the Text Editor dialog box will appear. All changes that you make to the written content of your pages will occur within this Text Editor dialog box.

The Text Editor dialog box provides you with a wide range of options for the modification of your text.