You are a business owner with a wonderful new website created by your web developer. You have just purchased Macromedia Contribute, a new content solution created by the leader in professional web design software; with it, you're ready to add and update the pages of your website yourself. Your site administrator will handle the technical content. You have installed the program. Now what?

This article will help you get going with Contribute in just a few easy steps. First, we are going to discuss how to set up a local site, access web pages, and edit them with Contribute. Second, we will show you how to publish the finished pages to the remote site and how to create new pages. After you complete these easy steps, you will be able to do routine maintenance on your own!

Macromedia Contribute truly offers, as the slogan puts it, "relief for web professionals." But you may not realize that this newly introduced program can provide another function as well. With some minor modification, Contribute serves as a terrific business development tool. By customizing Contribute, you can supply solutions tailored to a particular client in a co-branded environment.

Contribute was built on the extremely extensible Dreamweaver MX foundation. Much of the interface, such as menus and toolbars, as well as the functionality found in objects and commands is also extensible in Contribute. In addition, there are two new areas open to customization:

• Welcome page: The very first page users see when they start Contribute can be customized and, if desired, co-branded with your company's name and information.
• Task panel: The lower portion of the Contribute sidebar, labeled with a user-friendly "How Do I" notation, provides a quick reference for basic program tasks—and can be customized to guide your client's users through company or industry-specific operations.

Article Series

This article is part 1 of a 5 part series. Other articles in this series are shown below:

1. Co-Branding Contribute
2. Welcome to the Welcome page
3. Adding your brand
4. Maintaining the special features
5. Deploying your custom pages