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Setting up a your first site in Dreamweaver 8

Many benefits are offered in pre- determining your site structure in Dreamweaver, the array of options and different boxes that are presented is a little over whelming particularly to the new user, the purpose of this tutorial is to example in simple terms how setting up a site for the first time can be accomplished with ease . Before you start you may wish to know that the following can be viewed in QuickTime Video Format here: Beginners Dreamweaver Tutorials.

To set up a site in Dreamweaver for the first time we need to go to Site > New Site, this will present you with a dialog box ( image 1.0 ), notice on the top of the box two different modes that are available, Basic or Advanced, we are going to use Advanced, this will give you a greater understanding of what is going on behind the scenes, and in the long term will make setting up sites easier and quicker


:
image 1.0

Lets get started.
Notice at the top a left a list of categories which start with Local Info (1.1 ), this is where we are going to start. You need not concern yourself with the other categories just yet we shall be getting to them in due course.

image 1.1

Site Name
 You can enter any descriptive text you like into this field (1.2 ).
Local root folder: enter the location to the folder on your local computer where you are going to store all your web documents for the site you are working on, it’s a good idea to click the little yellow folder icon to the right of the text box, this will allow to navigate to the location of the folder on your local machine.

image 1.2


Local root folder
 enter the location to the folder on your local computer where you are going to store all your web documents for the site you are working on, it’s a good idea to click the little yellow folder icon to the right of the text box , this will allow to navigate to the location of the folder on your local machine.

image 1.3


Refresh local file list automatically:
You should check this option, this will allow Dreamweaver to handle updates to your site more quickly.
image 1.4

Default images folder:
Ideally you should have already created a new folder that resides inside the main web folder and called it images. Click on the little yellow folder icon to the left of the text box and navigate to the location of your images folder.
image 1.5

Links relative to:
 It’s a good ideal for beginners to use the document option, in the 10 years that I have been designing web sites all my links have always been relevant to the document and never to the site root.
image 1.6

HTTP address:
Enter your full web address for example ( http://www.coolsites.com ). This allows Dreamweaver to detect links that refer to your site.
image 1.7

Case-sensitive links :
I always leave this blank, and if you follow the correct convention for the naming of your files you will never need to check this, you should never use capital letters, spaces or special characters in your file names, except the underscore “_” or the hyphen “ - “.
image 1.8

Cache :
I always enable this, it really does speed Dreamweaver up, I would advise all users to do the same.
image 1.9

Your Local Info box should now look like this:

In the next Dreamweaver tutorial we are going to be looking at the other options relating to Remote Info
Part two of this tutorial >>