Subtitles of the Movie

In this section of the course I cover a very important topic, setting up a Dreamweaver site. It's important that you set up a Dreamweaver site properly before starting to work on any aspect of the website. In Dreamweaver the term site refers to a local or remote storage location for the documents that belong to a website. A site is a collection of all the files and assets in your website, you can see an example of my geek manual site here, this is a set of linked documents and assets with shared attributes such as related topics, a similar design, or a shared purpose. In essence Dreamweaver is a site creation and management tool so you can use it to create individual documents and complete websites. A Dreamweaver site like I have here provides a way to organize and manage all of your web documents, upload your site to a web server which is over here to the left as I'll be demonstrating later in this site management tool here. You simply drag the files from the local side over to the right to your host which is over to the left. A dreamweaver site not only provides a way to organize and manage all of your web documents and upload your site to a web server but it also will allow you to track and maintain your links, manage and share files and much much more. It's important that you design a site then to take advantage of all of these Dreamweaver features. To define a Dreamweaver site all you really need to do is establish or define a local folder, local root folder on your local computer to transfer files to a web server or to develop web applications, you'll also need to add information for a remote site and a testing server, a Dreamweaver site consists of as many as three parts or folders depending on your development type and the type of website you're developing. The local root folder which is represented by this section over here in my files window stores the files you're working on, Dreamweaver refers to this folder as your local site. This folder can be on your local computer or can be on a network server if you work directly on the server Dreamweaver uploads files to the server every time you save the document. Otherwise the file's being saved to your local computer. Now the remote folder which is represented over here to the left in the files window stores your files for testing, production, collaboration, and so on. Dreamweaver refers to this folder as your remote site here in the files panel, notice that this says Remote Site and that says Local File right there. Typically, your remote folder is on the computer where your web server is running. Together, the local and remote folders allow you to transfer files between your local hard disk and the web server making it easier to manage files in your Dreamweaver site. You also may want to use a testing server, the testing server folder is the folder where Dreamweaver processes dynamic pages, you can create web pages on your computer, upload them to a web server and maintain the site by transferring updated files whenever you save them. You can also maintain and edit sites in Dreamweaver that were not created with Dreamweaver for example they might have been created with another HTML editor or maybe you hand coded some HTML pages, all of these web documents can be managed in Dreamweaver just as if they were created in Dreamweaver itself. We will now move on to the next movie and review in more detail exactly how to set up a site in Dreamweaver CS4.