Let us switch over to Dreamweaver now. Again, I am going to use ALT+Tab or command+tab if you are on a Mac and I already have Dreamweaver open. If you do not have Dreamweaver open, you will need to launch it to catch up with me here. The first thing we will do is site setup to load the site into Dreamweaver. Now, I am not going to show you this at the beginning of every lesson because in an advance lesson I expect that you already know this. But let us do a quick refresher course on site setup because it is so important to making sure everything else in Dreamweaver works.
You will come over here to the files panel. Choose manage sites and then the manage sites dialogue, we are going to create a new site. When the site definition dialogue appears, the first thing you want to do is give your site a name. Now, unlike files and folders where names really matter can have spaces, can have special characters, you site name is really just for your benefit. Dreamweaver uses this to identify the site in the files panel. It is never going to go on the server; it is never going to be involved in links. So, you can call your site anything you want. In this case, I am going to call it scuba site.
Now, you want to identify the local root folder. This is the most important thing about site setup. What you are doing is you are telling Dreamweaver the folder that all of the images and other files in your website will reside in. This is crucial because if you want everything to work, when you upload your site to a server, all of your files and folders needs to remain in the same relative location. Links and image references are made with the path from one file to another. So, you have to tell Dreamweaver where that local root folder is, and you have to keep all of the files and folders that you want in your root folder inside that folder.
Setting that up is really easy, you click this little icon and any time you see a little yellow icon like this one, it looks like a folder, that is the browse button in Dreamweaver. Click on that, the files we watch should be on your desktop or wherever you install the files that came on this DVD. I am going to go in to project files in to lesson one and this is the dive site. Now, I selected here and then you can double click or you can click open and ones the word “open” changes to select, now, Dreamweaver has identified the dive site folder and when I click select, it will enter the path on my computer to that folder so that Dreamweaver knows where my root folder is.
Refresh local files list is a good practice. It is checked on default because Dreamweaver is trying to keep track of files and folders that you might change outside of Dreamweaver. In general, I strongly recommend that any changes you make to file names or locations you make within the files finder over here, you will see more of that as we go along with the lessons. But if you do change something outside of Dreamweaver, you will need to have this checked or you will need to use the refresh button for Dreamweaver to know you have made that change.
The default images folder is optional but it is a good practice as well. Again, I am going to click on the browse button, identify my images folder. Now, in this site as in many sites that you might create, I actually have multiple folders that have images in them. In this site for example, I have another folder called thumbnails. This folder down here at the bottom of the list has all my little tiny thumbnail images. And I wanted to keep those separate from my main images and I found it easier to keep them in separate folders. This kind of structural organization within a site is completely up to you as the designer. The only that matters is that you do not use spaces or special characters in the file name. and just another little tip, that is not because it would not work on your Mac or PC, in fact, a lot of designers getting trouble because they do not worry about that kind of detail on the Mac or PC and they test their links locally and they all work fine, then they upload their site to a server
