Creating A Basic Web Site With Adobe Dreamweaver
Posted on August 27, 2008 at 10:19 am by Andrew Whiteman
Adobe Dreamweaver has been empowering computer users to build their own web sites for over ten years now. In that time, it has grown to become a feature-packed and complex piece of software which can be a little scary for new users. This article aims to show users the key steps necessary to creating a basic Dreamweaver web site and the essential tools they should be using.
It’s always a good idea to sketch out a plan of how the site will work and what kind of user experience it will offer. Dreamweaver will not give you any assistance at this stage, so just use pen and paper. Start by building a basic site, one that you know you can complete without getting bogged down in technologies that you do not understand.
The second important pre-Dreamweaver operation is the creation of a “local root folder”. This is Dreamweaver jargon for the folder that contains all of the files which form part of your site. You can create it anywhere: your desktop, your hard drive, a network volume, etc. However, it is important that you only put your site files in this folder and nothing else.
You should also add an images folder inside the “local root folder”. It can have any name you like but later, when you set up the Dreamweaver site, it will be designated as the default images folder and will help to ensure that your visitors don’t see any blank image icons on your pages.
Now we can open up Dreamweaver and create a new web site. To do this, find the Site menu and choose New Site. When the New Site window appears, be sure to click on the Advanced tab at the top of the screen. Ironically Advanced mode makes it easier to select only the key options you need to enter. Of the categories displayed on the left, we will need to enter Local Info and Remote Info.
In the Local Info window, enter a name for you new site then specify the location of the local root folder and default images folder you created earlier. The easiest way of doing this is to click on the browse icons next to each of these two boxes (the yellow folder icons).
Next you need to click on the Remote Info category on the left of your screen. This is where you tell Dreamweaver how to connect to the server that contains your web pages. For a public website, choose FTP as the access method and ask your web hosting company for the other details required. For an intranet, choose Local/Network as the access method and navigate to the server and sub-directory containing your company intranet.
Before actually putting any content in your pages, you should ensure that all the pages you mapped out in your original plan have been created and saved. So, instead of creating and completing a page at a time, you create and save every single page. This will prevent the creation of links that don’t work properly because, when you come to create a link, the page you are linking to will already exist; you point to it and ask Dreamweaver to create the link.
There’s still one more step that you should do before you are ready to actually start work on the page content; you should create at least one template. Templates allow you to maintain a consistent look and feel throughout the site. It consists of fixed elements, such as logo and navigation links and what Dreamweaver calls “Editable Regions”. These are the areas of the page which can be altered each time you use the template.
When you have finished your template, you can finally begin entering content into your web pages. When you open each page, begin by applying the template to the page. Then enter the page content into the editable regions. If you spot an error on the main layout, just go back to the template to correct it.
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