Subtitles of the Movie

When I look back at all my years of teaching introductory level Dreamweaver to students, colleagues, and clients literally from all over the world, I'm surprised at how often these beginning Dreamweaver students have trouble with the very topic of this movie, how to set up their websites on a remote server. After all, the whole point of this is to create websites on your computer that you can upload to a remote web server so the whole world can see your handiwork. To do this you'll need to employ the services of a web server or web host. This movie then will cover some tips and techniques that you'll need to really know and understand to make this relationship smooth and easy and more efficient. If you've already hosted your sites on a remote server and you already have perhaps a host provider and that you're working fine with them, you can probably skip this movie and move onto the next one. However if this is the first time you'll be hosting your Dreamweaver pages on a remote server and you don't have yet a host provider then this is the movie for you. Now the first thing we need to do, as I covered in the previous movie is go to the main menu under site and choose new site, to establish a new Dreamweaver site. That'll bring up the site definition window. Go ahead and give your site a name. I'm going to call this test, and set up a local root folder for that site. This is never a problem at this stage of your work. Typically this local root folder comes into play and gives you trouble later on in your Dreamweaver studies when you start creating multiple sites or you move things or change things around. But right now that's not the problem. No one usually has trouble designating a local folder to host your Dreamweaver site. The problem comes right here in the next step under category remote info. You're going to want to set up access FTP. We're going to be using Dreamweaver's FTP client to transfer through file transfer protocol or FTP, your files that you create in Dreamweaver here on your local computer up to the remote web server. And the problem comes right here after you choose FTP, the FTP host. Now you can use other FTP clients other then Dreamweaver. You might as well use Dreamweaver's FTP client. It's just as good as any other. In fact it's excellent and it's all integrated into your workspace, so it'll make your work flow more efficient and easier. Now usually you'll need to get three pieces of information to connect to your host. Sometimes you'll have a host directory, but unless specified otherwise leave that blank. You'll need your address, the location of the FTP server that you're leasing from your hosting provider, your login and your password. Usually the login is your name or your email address. They'll provide that to you. Your password, often you determine what that is. They give you the password and then they allow you to change it. The problem is right there, the FTP host. Now perhaps what makes this so troublesome is this FTP host information goes by many names. Rarely do the providers call it FTP host. It's could be your FTP address. It could be your FTP service and so on. But the general idea is to contact your host and find out what you need to put in this dialog right here. Ideally you want to contact your host that has someone that knows Dreamweaver and then you can just ask them point blank, "what do I put in the FTP host box right here?" Let me review for you now the most common errors that you'll get if any one of these three pieces of information is incorrect. So I have my FTP hosts. There by the way is my FTP address for my EarthLink account. I have my password. Let me try an incorrect login. And once you get these three pieces of information in, click on the test button. Now if you have incorrect login or password access info, you'll get this error; an FTP error occurred, cannot make connection to the host. Your login or password is incorrect. Please check your connection information. That's pretty strait forward. The more common error however is if your FTP host information is incorrect. That error will look like this. Let's put some wrong information up there in the FTP host and then press test. Dreamweaver will try to connect to your host. It says an FTP error occurred, cannot make connection to the host. The remote host cannot be found. This is the key error right there. The remote host cannot be found means that that address right there is incorrect and you'll need to get that access information before you'll be able to connect. So let me wrap up this movie with a summary of how to avoid this common problem associated with setting up your Dreamweaver sites to a remote server. Number one, ask your friends and colleagues for reliable and inexpensive web hosting providers preferably, providers with twenty-four seven telephone text support or at least support personnel who know Dreamweaver, that way you can ask them point blank, "hey what do I put in for the FTP host?" If they don't know Dreamweaver they tend to give you FTP address or hosting address or server address but not FTP host. You can also do a search in Google on the keywords web hosting to locate hosting providers. If they don't have telephone text support keep on bugging them for the three pieces of information that you'll need to get connected, FTP host, login, and password. And my last piece of advice is get your site defined and tested early, that way you can connect to your site and get your remote server set up before you really start working much in Dreamweaver to make sure that everything is working and everything is ok.