Written Tutorial Starts:
1. Site? Local Root? What?
Dreamweaver provides you with a quick and easy way to organize your files within Dreamweaver and allow you to take advantage of Dreamweaver’s powerful website organizational tools, upload your website to a web server, auto maintain links when pages are moved around, as well as generally managing and sharing files. When you define a site in Dreamweaver, you allow your site to take full advantage of everything Dreamweaver has to offer…
2. Organization Begins With You
Your Dreamweaver site will basically be referencing a folder on your hard drive. With that in mind, I like to create my folder structure first and then link it to Dreamweaver. I like to create a few folders for every website. A “css” folder, an “images” folder, a “js” (JavaScript) folder, and a “fonts” folder just incase we want to use custom fonts on our site (there are multiple ways to serve fonts to your site, this is just one option-we’ll discuss this is a different tutorial). NOTE: The “Root” folder is the “master” folder that we will create to hold all of our website stuff.
3. Create The Folders
Set up a place on your hard drive where you will be organizing your web work and create a new folder for this project. I’m going to name this project “Nameless”. Within that “Nameless” folder I am going to create a folder for “css”, “images”, “js”, and “fonts”. We are now ready to jump into Dreamweaver and setup our Dreamweaver site.
4. Create New Site/Root Folder
There are a few different ways to create a new site, but to keep things simple just navigate to the toolbar at the top of the screen and choose “Site>New Site”.
5. Naming your Site
Dreamweaver will prompt us to name the new site. This can be any name you want. Only you and your web design team will ever see this name, it is never published online. I am naming our new site “Nameless Project”.
6. Find Our Folder
Next, Dreamweaver prompts us to select our “Local Site Folder”. This is the folder that we created to contain our “css”, “images”, etc… folders just a moment ago. Click on the little folder icon to the right and find that folder on your hard drive. Double click the folder to get inside of it and choose the “Select” button.
7. Servers
This could be a topic for an entire tutorial. I’m just going to touch on it very briefly here. Dreamweaver allows you to setup your remote (or local) server here so you can upload files right from Dreamweaver to your web hosting. This is not required to set up a site and start working in Dreamweaver though so we’ll pass over it here. Just know that you have lots of options and can even set up multiple servers for a single web project.
8. Save!
Once you have given your site a name and selected the Local Site Folder, hit the “Save” button to set up your Dreamweaver site. It’s that easy! We’re now ready to add our pages and start adding text, images, video, and anything else your website needs.
9. Create Files, Folders, and Begin Building Your Website
Go Window>Files to open the Files panel. To create a new file or folder, my favorite method is simply right-clicking in the “Files” panel and choosing “New File” or “New Folder”. You can immediately give that new file a name and drag it to whatever folder it needs to be in, or you can leave it right there in the “root” level of your website. Beginner Tip: Your homepage must be in the root level of your site and must be named “index.html” (or index.php, index.aspx, etc… etc… depending on the code you’re writing with.)
10. That’s it!
So to recap, Dreamweaver Sites allow you to take full advantage of the management tools Dreamweaver provides. You want to setup your file structure (and it’s great to have a sketch of the pages you expect to be in your website before you even start building) on your hard drive first and connect Dreamweaver to that folder. Create the site, link it to the folder, and build away!
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