Step By Step Web Site Creation With Adobe Dreamweaver

Adobe Dreamweaver has been empowering computer users to build their own web sites for over ten years now. In that time, it has grown to become a feature-packed and complex piece of software which can be a little scary for new users. This article aims to show users the key steps necessary to creating a basic Dreamweaver web site and the essential tools they should be using.

It’s always a good idea to sketch out a plan of how the site will work and what kind of user experience it will offer. Dreamweaver will not give you any assistance at this stage, so just use pen and paper. Start by building a basic site, one that you know you can complete without getting bogged down in technologies that you do not understand.

Next, create a folder somewhere on your hard disk or desktop which will contain all of the files which will make up your site. Dreamweaver refers to this folder as the “local root folder”. It should contain nothing but the files pertaining to your web site and will become a mirror image of your actual site when the site goes live.

Next, create a folder inside the “local root folder” which will hold your images. This will help you to avoid ending up with “broken images” on your site, where visitors are presented with an empty box instead of the actual image.

Having created the site folders, you are ready to complete the Dreamweaver site definition. Launch Dreamweaver and click on New in the Site menu. When the New Site dialogue appears, click on the Advanced tab. This will allow you to complete the two essential categories required for a basic site: Local Info (relating to your version of the site) and Remote Info (the live version of the site.

In the Local Info window, enter a name for you new site then specify the location of the local root folder and default images folder you created earlier. The easiest way of doing this is to click on the browse icons next to each of these two boxes (the yellow folder icons).

The second piece of information is Remote Info. In this section, you tell Dreamweaver how to connect to the server hosting your web site. Set you Access Method to Local/Network if you are working on an intranet site then browse to locate your intranet server. Choose FTP if you are working on a public website for the internet and enter your FTP login details in each of the boxes. This information will be supplied by your web hosting company.

Before actually putting any content in your pages, you should ensure that all the pages you mapped out in your original plan have been created and saved. So, instead of creating and completing a page at a time, you create and save every single page. This will prevent the creation of links that don’t work properly because, when you come to create a link, the page you are linking to will already exist; you point to it and ask Dreamweaver to create the link.

There’s still one more step that you should do before you are ready to actually start work on the page content; you should create at least one template. Templates allow you to maintain a consistent look and feel throughout the site. It consists of fixed elements, such as logo and navigation links and what Dreamweaver calls “Editable Regions”. These are the areas of the page which can be altered each time you use the template.

Having finished your template or templates, you are ready to build the web pages that will constitute your site. Simply open each page, choose Modify – Templates – Apply Template to Page and then add the text, images etc. that make up the page.

You can get up to date information on Dreamweaver training courses, visit Macresource Computer Training, a UK IT training company offering Dreamweaver Classes in London and throughout the UK.