The Dreamweaver templates feature

Dreamweaver has an incredibly handy feature that allows you to create one template page that will have control over the rest of the pages on your site when you change it. So if you create a new page from this template, every time you decide to alter the main template, the rest of the pages will change with it.

I’m not great at explaining things, so hopefully that was clear enough. Nonetheless, if you give it a try you will realise how simple it is, and you will wonder why you didn’t try it out sooner.

The only problem with this method is that any pages that you currently have will need to be made again from this main controlling template. But it is well worth taking the time to replace these pages and create them from the template, as it will save you a hell of a lot of hassle in the future. So here we go…

How to do it

1) Open up Dreamweaver, and open up the main page that has the design that you want the rest of your pages to look like, with all the navigation you want included on future pages. This will normally be your home page.

2) Highlight the text or boxed area that you will add content to on future pages. For example, if you put articles and content in the centre are of your page, highlight the text in this area or the table surrounding it. This will become the part that looks different on each page; the rest will stay the same.

3) Click on insert > template object > editable region. Click OK when it tells you that the file will be converted into a template. You will then be asked to give it a name, so give it whatever you like, it doesn’t really matter. I normally call it something like ‘content’.

4) You can add a few more editable regions if you like, it all depends on how much of the page you intend you change on future pages. It’s a good idea to think about how you intend on expanding your site and how the navigation will turn out when adding your editable regions.

5) Save the page, it will be saved as a template.

6) Now the next time you decide to make a new page for your site, click on: file > new, and then choose the ‘template’ tab, which will show you a list of templates that you have made. There will probably only be the one, so click on the one you just made and open it up. Now add content as you wish to your editable regions, and save the page as you would with any other normal page.

Done!

The next time you decide to change your navigation across all of your pages, all you will have to do is open up the main template from your files and edit away. When you decide to save, it will ask if you would like to update the rest of the pages that have been created from this template. Click OK and the rest of your sites navigation will change. Pretty simple.

It will probably be a good idea to give this a test first, just to see how it works. It’s not too difficult, but it’s always a good idea to know exactly how everything works before creating all of your pages from one template.

Also, be sure to add enough editable regions, so that you won’t want to add content to one place but be unable to because you forgot to make it editable.

Have fun!

This works by creating a page in your site that automatically sends that person to the poker website. The page will use a PHP redirect, which will mean that as soon as someone visits this page they will be immediately be redirected to the page (or website in this case) through your affiliate link. For example, you can create a file called pokerstars.html and use a specific code to send your visitor to that poker room site through your affiliate link within the file. Therefore if you link to this file instead of using an affiliate link every time, you will be able to change all of your affiliate links by simply changing the one affiliate link that is contained within this file.

As you can hopefully see from the example above, PHP Redirect makes things so much easier for affiliate links, as it will mean that you only have to change one affiliate link for PHP redirecting if you ever need to change them. Whereas you would need to change each individual link in the ‘standard’ way.

This may seem pretty complicated, but it is probably harder to explain than actually do, so I suggest you give it a go to see how it works. Try creating a webpage file with the following code in it, replacing the link with any affiliate link. Then visit that webpage on your site and you will see that you are immediately redirected to the website through your affiliate link.

The Code

<?php
header( ‘Location: http://www.youraffiliatelinkhere.com’ ) ;
?>

IMPORTANT: Make sure that this is the only code within the page, otherwise it will not work. So make sure to get rid of any head, body tags or anthing else that might be on the page.

So if you call this file pokerstars.html, then everytime you link to www.yoursite.com/pokerstars.html and a visitor clicks on it, they will be redirected to the pokerstars site through your link. It is all pretty simple, and saves a hell of a lot of hassle if it turns out that you have to change your affiliate links one day. All you will have to do using this method is change the ‘http://www.youraffiliatelinkhere.com’ part and everything will work fine.

Also Shortens Affiliate Links

The great thing with this method is that it makes your affiliate links a lot shorter and sweeter. So instead of having long affiliate links with lots of random symbols showing up at the bottom of the browser when a visitor hovers over the link, they will see something a lot nicer looking like http://www.yoursite.com/pokerstars.html. For example, this is how a full tilt link can appear at the bottom of your browser window when you hover over the link:

Alternatively, you can create a sub folder like ‘go’, and then create further subfolders for each poker room and create an index.html file containing the specific code for each room redirect. This will do the exact same thing as the method above, but you will have a more organsied looking directory with your links pointing to www.yoursite.com/go/pokerstars/ rather than www.yoursite.com/pokerstars.html. But however you choose to organise these redirects is completely up to you.