Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 Tutorials
Site Setup / Creating a Site
Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 / Site Setup / Creating a Site)
In this movie I review the all important process of setting up a site in Dreamweaver CS4. Before you set up a site or a testing server you first must define a local and a remote folder. The local folder will just be a folder here on your local hard drive, I usually choose a folder right off my C drive, something not too deep, perhaps the name of the website or the name of the project, right here near the root folder for my C drive here. Once you've determined that will be your site root or your local site root, go to the Site Menu up here at the top of the interface and you want to do either New Site or Manage Sites, New Site will create a brand new Dreamweaver site, Manage Site will allow you to edit a site, duplicate a site, remove a site, or import or export a site setting, let's start with New Site and that brings up this very important dialogue, the site definition dialogue where you can define the various information for you site, the first thing you want to do is provide a site name. So let's call this Test 2, this is going to be the name that you're going to see in the whole list of perhaps all of your other Dreamweaver sites, so be creative, you can include spaces and capitals but I definitely encourage you not to use spaces and capital letters in other types of names that you're working with in Dreamweaver. Here is the all important local root folder designation right here, if you're going to make a mistake this is probably where you'll start with problems is that you want to definitely browse to the location of the folder that you've designated on your local computer as your local site root so I'm going to go to my computer here and let's go to my C drive and then probably I want to choose one of these folders right here, let's do Casa Boa Vida 2 for example and I'm going to click on Open and then Select so there is my local root folder. The key here is that I'm going to want to save all of my site assets to this folder on my C drive, that would include HTML files, graphic files, video files, CSS or cascading style sheet files and so on. Next, set links relative to document, this is a potentially major problem if you get confused here, you don't want to switch back and forth between document relative links and site root relative links, generally, if you're going to be moving your project from computer to computer or working on a variety of computers I would definitely recommend document relative linking, I'd suggest document relative linking for my students because often times they work in the lab, they work at home, they work in the office, and so on. The HTPP address would be the domain name probably that you're going to be setting up with a host, so in this case, in my case it would be www.geekmanuals.com make sure you spell that correct, that's not actually critical that you fill that out, case sensitive links, I would definitely recommend that you use case sensitive link checking. Later on we'll talk about how to use Dreamweaver's file manager to check links because most hosts are Unix based and they are case sensitive, you will run into problems if you are not careful with case sensitive, in general I recommend that you just use lower case all the time. You definitely want to enable the cache, the cache maintains the file and asset information in the site, this speeds up the asset panel and link management features, more on the cache later but definitely make sure that that is enabled. Next you want to go to the remote info category and you probably, depending on how you want to access your remote side, you probably want to do FTP although other options are local network, webDAV, RDS, or Microsoft Visual Source Safe. Usually I set up an FTP account with my students and then what you'll want to do is make sure that you get from your host the FTP host information this is also referred to as the FTP address, the login, and the password information, you can usually leave the host directory blank. Once you've tested your FTP host, login and password information you want to save it. You may find that using passive FTP will give you better results. You may also need to use the IP Version 6 transfer mode, you want to check that with your host, if you're behind a firewall you can set your firewall settings, but generally I leave everything here to the default. By default you want to maintain synchronization information but do not automatically upload files to server on saved, this is a good way to cause problems and if you're not careful that you've really got a valid or a good document and if you have problems in that document and then you do automatically upload files to server on save and there are problems with the file then you'll erase the good file on your remote side, on your server side. Also, enable file check in and check out is disabled, this is only useful if you're working in teams of developers or Dreamweaver users, if you do choose to enable file check in and check out, you want to make sure to check out files when opening and then you have a check out name and then an email address, basically what this means is that if you check something out and and someone requests that, they need to know where your email is so they can ask you when you'll be done with the file because they can't work on it while you still have it checked out. Let me go ahead and cancel out of here and show you by using site, Manage Sites where you can edit your sites, let me show you what this remote side will look like, what remote info will look like when you have an actual working host, here, is my FTP host will address my username, my password, and I'm using passive FTP notice if I click on Test, you'll get this message, ÒDreamweaver connected to your web server successfully.Ó If you for example have outdated information or incorrect information you'll get different kinds of errors, for example here's another client site and it's giving me ÒFTP connection error occurred, cannot make connection to host, your login or password is incorrect.Ó So in this case my FTP host is correct but my password is not correct. Let's go ahead and change the FTP host and now test it and I'll get a different error, it's trying to connect and it cannot, it says ÒAn FTP error occurred, cannot make connection to the host, no response from the server.Ó So those are the two kinds of errors that you'll get, this one by far is the most common is that my students or myself, I don't have the correct FTP host information and again, you'll need to get that from your host provider, often times it's a little bit confusing because they tend to give you your URL address which is different, your URL address is what you'll type in the browser to view the site, this address is the one you need to upload your local files to the remote side of the Dreamweaver files manager. Now in addition to having troubles getting the correct FTP host, login, and password information from their host providers, my students also have some trouble understanding the difference between the local and the remote folder structures here and what they mean so let me now move on to the next movie and go over in more detail the differences between Dreamweaver, identifies the local and remote folders so you can understand them better.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 |
| Author: | James Gonzalez |
| SKU: | 33968 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-30-0 |
| Release Date: | 2009-02-13 |
| Duration: | 9.5 hrs / 104 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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