Dreamweaver Tutorial - Site Set-Up

Setting up a your first site in Dreamweaver CS3 - Part two

In these tutorials we will continue with the setting up of our site definition for our first site, in the previous lesson we dealt with the settings that we appertaining to the Local Info panel, in this tutorial we have switched our attention to the Remote Info.

View Dreamweaver basics in video format: Beginners Dreamweaver Tutorial Videos.

Select Remote Info
The start with make sure the Remote info on the top left is selected, if it is the panel that Dreamweaver presents to you should resemble the one below ( image 13 ).

:
image 13

Not much to see yet, but if you select the options from the Access drop down field this soon changes, for the purpose of this tutorial we are going to select the most commonly used option “ FTP “, upon selecting this you will be presented with a panel like this.

image 14

For the most part the information that is need will have been supplied to you by either your ISP or your system administrator. After selecting the Remote Info Access type as FTP I shall enter the host address the website that we wish to connect to right in the FTP host field.

image 15

Host Directory
In most cases leaving the host directory empty will result in you logging in to the root of your web site, this will in most case not be the correct directory into which you will want to place your documents, you should therefore ask your ISP for the path to the folder where your documents will be stored, it is this path information that you should enter here. In my case whenever I login I have to place all the documents inside a folder entitled /htdocs as can be seen from the image below.

image 16

The login name and password
These are self explanatory and you should have already obtained these from your ISP, for the novice web users it is worth mentioning that usernames and passwords are case sensitive. Notice the "Test" button, once you have entered all the information pressing test with force Dreamweaver to try and connect, if successful you will be rewarded with a friendly message telling you that a connection was made
image 17

Use Passive FTP
Most ISPs support Passive mode and if at all possible you should always try to connect using Passive FTP, if however you are having problems connecting and you are sure all the login information is correct you may wish to try turning this off.
image 18

Use Firewall:
Firewalls are commonplace and all users are strongly advised to only connect to the internet from behind a firewall, depending on the configuration of your firewall you may have to select the firewall checkbox and then select the Firewall Settings button to enter a configuration that allows you to successfully connect to your server.
image 19

Use Secure FTP (SFTP):
I would imagine that most people reading this tutorial will have seen a secure web site one that displays https instead of just http, well SFTP is just the same, if supported by your ISP the login data is encrypted and authenticated by the exchanging of secure keys, if this method is supported I would strongly advise that you always connect using SFTP
image 20

HTTP address:
Enter your full web address for example ( http://www.example.com ). This allows Dreamweaver to detect links that refer to your site.
image 21

Maintain Synchronization information:
Once you open a connection to the server Dreamweaver will check to see if any files on the server are more up to date than the ones on your local machine if so it then downloads that copy to your local machine, Dreamweaver also carries out the same check on your local machine against the files on the server and like in the early example if the files on your local machine are more up to date than the ones on the server the more update files are sent via FTP to your web server. I have to be truthful here, I don’t like this feature, I prefer to decide which files I want to put where and when.

Automatically upload files to server on save.
I would advise that you avoid doing this; otherwise ever little change that you make on your site will be live to the world.

Check in Check out
For use when working in a collaborative environment, allows multiple people to work on your web site at the same time and removes to risk of two or more people working on the same web page at the same time.
image 22

Your Local Info box should now look like this:

The other options that are listed on the lefthand side are not needed to carry out basic functions, these subjects will be covered in later Dreamweaver tutorials.
<< Go back to Previous Tutorial