Introducing Dreamweaver to your Web Sites

Each web site you work on is a set of files in your computer. You may put your website files on your desktop, or you may put them in My Documents. It is best if you don't store your working files on a thumb drive or and external harddrive because you may end up with linking problems. If you have more than one site to work on, each website must be in its own folder!

For Dreamweaver to keep track of your links and upload to the correct place on the server, you have to tell Dreamweaver about each site and about the server. This is done in a panel called Manage Sites. If you don't see the Files panel, as shown in the screenshot, go to the Window menu and be sure there is a check by the Files item. In some versions of Dreamweaver, the panel is not on the left, but floats over the rest of th program windows.

To manage your sites, click the dropdown and choose Manage Sites or Edit Sites (depending on your version.) This should bring up the Manage Sites dialog box. The first time you work with the site, you choose New. For each site that you work on you will have a listing in the box. Later, if you want to change something, you choose the site and then click Edit.

That brings up a bigger dialog box with many choices of what you can tell Dreamweaver you want it to do with your site. For small web sites, there are two main things to set up 1) Dreamweaver's connection to your web files (Local Info), 2) Dreamweaver's connection to your server space (Remote Info.) Choose which one you want in the Category box. If your window doesn't look like this, you may be in the Basic tab instead of the Advanced tab. This lesson will use the Advanced tab.

1. Let's do Local Info. The dialog opens there unless the Basic tab is up. Make sure you are in the Advanced tab.

2. Name your site. A good name would be the name of the folder you have the web files in. If you don't have a folder set up for your web files, go ahead and do it.

3. Click the little folder icon and choose the folder you have set up to hold your web files. This step tells Dreamweaver where the folder is on your computer and what the folder is called.

4. Now we will tell Dreamweaver what it needs to do to connect to your server. Click Remote Info in Categories.

5. The rest of the boxes won't be on the screen until you choose FTP under Access. If you are working on a site for an organization with their own web servers on site, your network administrator may give you a different way of setting up your Remote Info. Otherwise, choose FTP.

6. The computer/network that hosts your web site has a name. Some systems are set up to use your domain name. In any case, you will have to get this from your web hosting service.

7. Your host has set up your login (user ID).

8. You host has also given you a password.

9. After you have typed all this in, click Test to see if you can make a connection.

10. If you can't connect, you may be on a host that requires a secure connection.*

If this doesn't work, call your web host for help.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Because of security needs, there are various methods of connecting to a server besides traditional FTP. "SCP and SFTP are file transfer protocols that work similarly to FTP but run over an encrypted connection and are therefore much more secure."
from http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/inside/computer_resources/manual/network/sftp.htm