In this step we will create a template page that will be a base for creating other web pages. Using the template we will be adding a DHTML menu to all the pages of the website that will be used by visitors for navigation.

Important note
If you want to add a DHTML menu to your site, it is a good idea to do that with the use of a Dreamweaver template page. If you have, for example, 10 pages in you site and you put the same menu onto each page respectively you will actually have 10 menus that will look exactly the same. In this case it will take a lot of time and effort to do any future modification to the menus. Moreover, using multiple menus will result in attaching redundant menu script files to your site. That's why it is a much better idea to use a Dreamweaver template page. In this case the only page that will actually contain the menu will be the template. Since the pages of your site are based on this template, any changes made to the menu will be automatically applied to all of them.

Choose File > New... from the main menu and select the General tab. In the Category window choose Template page, then HTML template from the window to the right and click Create button. You can save the page as template-1. We will place a site menu at the top of the template but at the moment we do not actually have any pages in our site so creating the menu now would be simply predicting what pages the site will contain.

That's why we will just leave a place for the menu at the moment. You can place the cursor at the top of the template page and type, for example, Site menu will go here to mark the place. After we add some pages to our site we will get back here and create a menu.

Now we will add an Editable Region under the text so our site pages can define their own contents. Right-click on the template page below the text (click Enter to move to the next line) and choose Templates > New Editable Region... Type a name of the region and click OK. For now we leave the template page. After we add some pages to our site we will get back here and complete the menu.