Dreamweaver CS5.5 : Setting Up a Site

Choose Site→New Site to open the Site Setup window (see Figure 1).

You only need to provide a couple of pieces of information.

Type a name for your site.

The name you type here is solely for your own reference, to help you identify the site in Dreamweaver’s Files panel; it won’t appear on the Web.

Click the folder icon to the right.

The Choose Root Folder window opens, where you select a folder on your hard drive to serve as your local site’s main (root) folder. You’ll store all of your site’s files—HTML documents and graphics, CSS files, and other files that make up your site—in this folder.

Note:

Another way to think of the local site folder: It’s the folder on your computer in which you’ll put your site’s home page.

Browse to and select a folder for your site’s files.

Figure 2 demonstrates the process for Windows and Macs. If you’re editing an existing site, select the folder that contains the site’s files. If you’re creating a new site, create a folder for that site using the New Folder button in this window.

For a few additional options, select Advanced from the left-hand list of setup categories (see Figure 3).

This step is optional and you can happily skip it to begin building web pages. You’ll find most of the categories in the Advanced Setting category , but you may want to visit the options in the Local Info category:

• The Default Images folder field lets you select (or create) a folder inside your site folder to hold the images you’ll use on your web pages. Choosing an images folder is useful only if you tend to add images from outside of your site folder—for example, if you have images sitting on your desktop or in another folder on your hard drive. If that’s the case, Dreamweaver automatically copies those files to the images folder you specify here. (Dreamweaver will still copy image files to your site without setting this option, but each time you add an image from outside your site folder, you have to tell Dreamweaver where to save the file. If you’ll primarily use images saved somewhere in your site, skip this setting.)

  Figure 2. The dialog box for selecting a folder in Windows (top) is pretty much the same as the one for Macs (bottom). You can verify which folder you’re about to select by looking in the Select field for Windows (circled in top image) or in the path menu on a Mac (circled in bottom image).

  

  Figure 3. You can happily use Dreamweaver without ever visiting the Advanced Settings options listed in the left-hand column of the Site Setup window.
  

  

• Media queries are a CSS-based tool that let you set up different formatting rules for a page based on (among other things) the screen resolution of the device used to visit your site. In other words, you can design a site that displays differently on the small screen of a mobile device (for example, it may show just a single column of content) than it does on the much larger screen of a desktop browser (where you can fit, for example, a three-column design).

• Setting determines how Dreamweaver writes links to other pages in your site, links to images in your site, and links to external files, like Cascading Style Sheet files, Flash movies, and so on. Unless you’re an experienced web designer, stick with the normal “Document” setting here.

• Type the web address for your site in the Web URL box: for example http://www.chia-vet.com/. If you don’t yet have a web address, you can leave this blank. In some cases, you may need to add some more information after the domain name. For example, the address for your website might look something like this: www.somecollege.edu/~bob. Or you might be responsible for maintaining just part of a larger site—sometimes called a “sub site.” Regardless, just type the address you normally type into a web browser to visit your site. For example, www.mybigcompany.com/marketing.

• Leave the “Case-sensitive links checking” box unchecked. This is useful only when you have web pages and files on a Unix server that allows files with the same name but different letter cases: for example, HOME.html, home.html, or HoMe.html. Since Windows machines and Macs don’t let you do this, you’ll probably never have a site that has files named like this.

• Keep the Enable Cache box checked. Dreamweaver creates a site cache for each site you set up. That’s a small database that tracks pages, links, images, and other site components. The cache helps Dreamweaver’s site-management tools avoid breaking links, lets Dreamweaver warn you when you’re about to delete important files, and lets you reorganize your site quickly. The only reason to uncheck this box is if you have a really large website (tens of thousands of pages and images) and you notice that Dreamweaver is really slow whenever you begin to work on the site, move a file, change a file’s name, delete a file, or perform one of Dreamweaver’s other “site management” tasks. In that case, you may see a box saying “updating the site cache” or “checking links” that stays open and prevents you from using Dreamweaver for a minute or more—basically your site is so big that Dreamweaver has to spend a lot of time keeping track of your files and links.

Click the Save button to finish the site setup process.

Your site’s files (if there are any yet) appear in the Files panel. Now you’re ready to create web pages and take advantage of Dreamweaver’s powerful site-building tools.