Subtitles of the Movie

In Dreamweaver the term site refers to a local or remote storage location for the documents that belong to a website. A site is there for a collection of all the files and assets in your website and a website is a set of linked documents and assets with shared attributes such as they're all related in topic, they have similar design or they share a similar purpose. In this section of the course I'll cover a very important topic, how to set up and work with Dreamweaver sites. Most of the problems that my Dreamweaver students encounter in the first few months of working with Dreamweaver all can be traced back to a lack of understanding or experience or skills in setting up and working with Dreamweaver sites. In essence then, Dreamweaver is a site creation and management tool. We use it to create individual documents and complete websites. A Dreamweaver site provides a way to organize and manage all of your web documents as I've done here in my geek manual site. You can also upload your site to a web server, which is the left hand side of this files window right here. This allows you to track and maintain your links, manage and share files and much, much more. It's important that you define a site to take full advantage of Dreamweaver features, which I'll be describing in the next movie. A Dreamweaver site consists of as many as three parts or folders depending on your development environment and the types of websites you're developing. The first is the local root folder, which I have defined here as site geek manuals right here. The local root folder stores the files you're working on. Dreamweaver refers to this folder as your local site. Notice that it says local files right there. This folder can be on your local computer or it can be on a network server. If you work directly on the server, Dreamweaver uploads files to the server every time you save. The remote folder over here to the left stores your files for testing, production, collaboration and so on. That would be on the remote host or the remote file server. Dreamweaver refers to this folder as your remote site here in the files panel. Typically your remote folder is on the computer where your web server is running. Together the local and remote folders enable you to transfer files between your local hard drive and your web server simply by dragging and dropping files and folders from the locals files area here, the files manager, over to the remote site area. You can either drag and drop the files individually or you can use the upload and download buttons up here in the interface. This makes it very easy to manage files in your Dreamweaver sites. The third section is the testing server folder. This is the folder where Dreamweaver processes dynamic pages. Another way these all work together is you can create web pages on your computer. They'll be stored here in the local files area. Upload them to a web server and maintain the site by transferring updated files whenever you save them. You can also edit and maintain website in Dreamweaver that were not created in Dreamweaver. Simply save or place those files in your local files folder, your locally defined root folder on your local computer, connect to your web server and then upload them as you would files that were actually created in Dreamweaver itself. The first thing you need to do however, is to properly set up a site. You'll do that from that main menu under site manage sites. You'll get the manage sites dialog here. So let me now move onto the next movie and show you all the ins and outs, the important techniques and skills you'll need to know to properly set up a site in Dreamweaver CS3.