Subtitles of the Movie

When I look back at all my years of teaching introductory level Dreamweaver to students, colleagues, and clients, I'm always surprised at how often these beginning Dreamweaver students have trouble with the topics of this movie, setting up websites on a remote server and then managing those websites including the folders and files within those sites. So I'm going to spend a few minutes giving you some tips and tricks I've picked up over the years working with many many Dreamweaver students to help you avoid these problems. This is the kind of information you'll never see in the Dreamweaver help provided by Adobe and you'll rarely see this with Dreamweaver books because the authors don't work with Dreamweaver students day in and day out like I do so they don't see these real common problems that reoccur almost every single day, at least for me in working with students. Now the whole point of using Dreamweaver is to create websites on your computer that you can upload to a remote web server so the whole world can see your handy work. So let's start with tips for avoiding problems associated with your Dreamweaver sites to a remote server. Number one is you need to get a reliable inexpensive web hosting provider. Preferably a provider with twenty-four seven telephone tech support and also tech support personnel who know Dreamweaver, this is going to save you a lot of frustration and problems, is to find the right host and be able to contact them on the phone and ask them, here in the site definition for your site, what do I put for the FTP host box, sometimes providers call this FTP address, FTP URL, they have a lot of different names so getting someone who knows Dreamweaver is going to be more straightforward for you. Also get the login and password information. Without this information when you click on the test button you're going to get errors and you won't be able to upload your files to your remote host, you'll get an error like this one. If they don't have telephone support, you're going to need to bug them with emails. My second tip is to get your site defined and tested right away so that you can connect to your remote server early, this is before you work much with your Dreamweaver pages at all. Other site management tips include copying all the files into your local root folder as soon as you've establish that folder, never move or change file names outside of the Dreamweaver files window, use the remote site for your master files, use correct file naming and revision procedures which I'll talk about in a minute, clean out all unused files and folders, keep your site folder structure simple and back up your files frequently. Now my students encounter a lot of problems because their site files and their folder names are incorrect. So follow these guidelines and you'll avoid a lot of these problems. First only use lowercase letters a-z and numbers 1-9 for all file names. Don't use upper case letters because they're hard to remember and they do matter on most web servers so avoid them. Use descriptive names so you can remember the files, don't use special characters such as ampersand and at and pound sign and never use spaces in your names. Instead, string your words together using underscores or dashes. The google search engine prefers dashes so that's probably a better strategy, the dashes would be like this, my -file.htm like that, make sure that you have things spelled correctly, in other words just good practice in organizing and maintaining a good orderly structure and file names for all the files and folders that comprise your site folder. Additional file naming tips are never put periods in your file or folder names other than the three letter extension, so never do snow.boarder.htm instead use snow underscore boarder or snow -boarder.htm. Now, forward slashes are misinterpreted as path locations on hard drives so never use them in your file names for example my forward /new forward/ index.htm would be interpreted as the file name index.htm located in the new folder located in the my folder. So again, the more discipline you have in your file naming and your file and folder organization the fewer problems you'll have with Dreamweaver down the road. So there you have some site and file management tips, that will conclude this section of the tutorial, a very important section on site setup, let me now move on to the next section and review for you the Dreamweaver workspace.