Defining Your Local Site

The Dreamweaver site management window is a powerful tool for setting up and maintaining your web site. From the site management window, you can see a side-by-side overview of your files locally (on your hard drive) as well as those files on the web server.

This is just the beginning. You can create new files and link them before you even start working on your pages. You can do search and replace operations that will look through all the pages on your web site. You can display and print a graphical representation of your site. And these examples are just scratching the surface of what you can do in the site management window.

Let's take a closer look at the basics of site management.

Start by launching the site management window. If it is not open on your screen, you can simply select Site from the main menu. In the Site menu, select New Site...,to create a new site or , choose an option Manage Sites..., to open an existing site.

The site definition window will open either in Wizard of Advanced mode. You can switch modes by toggling the tab at the top of the window.

The first order of business is to define your site locally. This is how Dreamweaver handles the files and images on your local hard drive. In the first window, give the site a name in the site name box and specify your site's http address in the url box:

The site name is specific to Dreamweaver, and you can name the site whatever you wish -- this site name will not show up anywhere on your web pages.

Next, indicate whether you will be using server technology for dynamic web content, such as PHP with a MySQL database. In almost all cases, the default answer "no" is correct for sites on the BU Web. Click Next to proceed.

Next, specify where you will save files locally when working on the site. This could be a local network, but in most cases it will be your local machine. In this case, Dreamweaver will suggest a path to a new folder, which it will create with the name you enter. You can change the path if you want, either by typing or by browsing for a folder on your system. Click Next once you've chosen a location for your site's files.

You're finished defining your local site. Clicking Next will bring you to questions for defining your remote site - that is, for connecting to the server correctly.