if youre building a site for a real-estate company and you want to let the employees update the sales listings without messing up the page design, a template with locked regions can be an ideal way to allow sales staff to add new information without accidentally breaking anything. Templates are best used when youre creating a number of pages that share the same characteristics, such as the same background color, column design, or image arrangement. For example, if youre creating a Web site for a bedand- breakfast inn, such as the Inn on Tomales Bay featured in the examples in this chapter, you might create a template for all the pages where you want to show off the rooms in the Inn. In that case, you might create a room template design with a spot for a photo, descriptive text, and forward and back arrows so that visitors could easily move through the pages for all the rooms. As you create each new page, you would start with the template, changing only the photo, descriptive text, and links. Templates can save tons of time and help ensure that page designs are more consistent. Dreamweavers template feature has an additional functionality that enables you to make global changes to your site by changing just the template file. Heres how it works. If you create a series of pages with the same template, and then decide you want to alter the template design, the changes you make to the original template can automatically be applied to any or all the files created from the template. For example, if you need to change the logo for your bed-and-breakfast on all your pages, you can simply replace the logo on the original template and, using the automated update feature, apply that change to all the pages created with that template. This feature can be a huge timesaver when you need to make changes to several pages at once. Dreamweaver 8 includes a wealth of ready-to-use templates; with this version, you even find Starter Pages, which include prewritten text to help you get started with common sites features, such as calendars and product pages. Templates, starter pages, and many other predesigned components in Dreamweaver give you a choice of many page layouts, cascading style sheet designs, framesets, and table-based layouts that can help you create a Web site quickly. Creating Predesigned Pages with Dreamweavers Design Files Dreamweaver comes with a great collection of predesigned pages you can use to create Web sites with Cascading Style Sheets, frames, and complex page designs. Macromedia calls these design files, but they are essentially 90 Part II: Looking Like a Million (Even on a Budget) templates - predesigned pages you can customize with your own content. Using a template, or design file, to create a new page is similar to creating any other page in Dreamweaver with the added advantage that much of the work is already done for you. Dreamweavers design files do not include all the most advanced features of Dreamweaver templates, such as the capability to make global changes, unless you first save the files as custom templates (instructions for that are in the following section). Among Dreamweavers design files, you can find the following: _ Framesets: These page designs are specific to HTML frames, which enable you to display multiple pages on the screen at once. Chapter 7 has instructions for working with frames and frame templates. _ Page Designs (CSS): These files use Cascading Style Sheets to control layout and design. _ Starter Pages: These page designs include written content to give you a head start as you create common sections in a Web site, such as a calendar or product page.