The Dreamweaver engineers have a tough row to hoe – caught between the needs of novice users and hardcore code veterans the program often fails to gently guide users through the process of putting a web site together.
Adobe Dreamweaver – Easy Mistakes To Make… Part 1… is a Graphics Training Source mini-series that draws on Andrew’s Vast Reservoir o’ Training Experience to help you – yes you, avoid the Most Calamitous Dreamweaver Mistakes…
It’s only natural – you want to get going on your super interweb startup site so you fire up Dreamweaver and create a new document ready to get creative. Shame it feels so normal because it’s totally the Wrong thing to do and a fast route to nowhere. Why is that you ask, oh but let me tell you…
Web sites are collections of documents where every page and resource is a separate file sitting on a web server somewhere. Single pages rarely exist in isolation – they contain links to other pages, images are collected and displayed, video files are found and at the more technical end of it javascripts and Cascading Style Sheets all work together to determine a page ends up looking and working.
To get your pages to do just about anything those pages have to be able to communicate with other files. In an ideal world Dreamweaver manages those lines of communication and helps to create an infrastructure of directories and files that work together to create an functioning web site.
But it doesn’t just do that automatically, you have to tell Dreamweaver where the Root Folder for your site is BEFORE you start work (the Root folder is the folder where you keep the files that make up your site btw).
If you start off a Dreamweaver project by doing what comes naturally in other programs, i.e swing by the File Menu, choose New and get creating you’ll probably end up making a page that can’t be usefully uploaded to a server. You’ll also not be able to make use of some of Dreamweaver’s most useful features like the link management and it’s template system.
So when you start to work in Dreamweaver the first thing you should be doing is Defining a New Site. It’s very straight forward.
Create a folder where you want to store your web site (or locate the folder that already contains the site you’re working on).
In Dreamweaver go to the Site Menu and choose New Site.
New Site will bring up a dialogue with two options at the top – Advanced and Basic – choose Advanced and then, from the Categories list to the left of the dialogue box make sure the Local option is chosen. In the Local area of the dialogue box is a text field that says Site Name – fill that in with the name of your site. Under the Site Name is another text field that says Local Root Folder next to it. At the very end of it is a small folder icon. Click on the folder icon and show Dreamweaver the folder where your site is/will be located. Then click the ok button.
You need to do this before you start work on the site – otherwise, at the best, you won’t get the most out of Dreamweaver and at the worst you may not be able to upload your site without a lot additional fixing work…