Setting up a site in Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver has many features to help to manage your site as it grows and changes. First though you have to briefly set up your site.

Dreamweaver MX introduced a wizard for this to take you through step by step, but some questions it asks are intimidating and unnecessary. I prefer to use the 'Advanced' tab. To get started you only need to tell Dreamweaver the name for your site and where your root folder is, the rest can wait!

The name you choose is simply a way to tell one site from another on your own computer - it is never seen by browsers and can be almost anything.*

(*AOL users: if you plan to use your AOL account for your site then you must use your AOL screen name as the site name).

The whole site must be created within a single root folder. Click the little folder to the right of the path to choose your site folder. This should be given a short name preferably in lowercase and without punctuation or spaces. All names for your web pages, folders within your site root folder, images and other media such as sounds and movies are best kept to these same rules. Don't use spaces, instead use dashes (hyphens -) or better yet hold the shift key as you type a dash to_produce_an_underscore. Spaces will show as '%20' when displayed in the browser address bar, it's a Unix thing. Links and particularly JavaScript functions such as rollovers can be very fussy about file names. JavaScript prefers names to start with a letter rather than a number. The three or four letter extensions that define file types such as .jpg, .gif and .htm or .html are very very important and must not be changed.

When you set up your sites at home or at work don't hide your root folder deep within other folders, keep it near the top of your disk directory, probably on your C drive if using Windows. At Totton College the C drive is not available to students and would limit you to working at the same computer every week. We will create our site root folders on the server space available to you on log in. All pages, images and media that you want to publish on the Web must be kept within the site root folder. Any source images such as scans and Photoshop.psd files, uncompressed sound or movie files and the editable Flash files which end with a '.fla' extension should NOT go into the site root, but instead into a parallel folder of 'source files'.

If you wish to work on your site at home you can take the site root folder and its contents away on a USB stick or e-mail it to yourself. You will have to set up your home copy of Dreamweaver to recognise the site by giving it a name and telling Dreamweaver where you have put the folder.

For more information, Adobe have technical details on Web site management and setting up your root folder.