In this lesson, our goal is to take that single file that was exported from our Fireworks project and make it into a complete Dreamweaver site. Now I have got Dreamweaver already opened here and you can see we have access to the desktop files and all the other files on our computer. That includes our workflow project files folder and the export file from our last exercise.
But instead of just working with this on the desktop itself, I would like to actually start off by making a Dreamweaver site definition. This will allow Dreamweaver to manage a lot of little details for us. Now we could make a new site by going up to the site menu and of course choosing new at the top.
When you open up your site definition window, we have two choices of getting started. We can either use the advance tab which gives us access to all the settings of a site and we just fill each one of them in, or if we go over to the basic tab we will get a step by step Wizard.
In setting up a website, we do not have to set up every little detail at this point. So the Wizard is going to be our much better choice for right now. To begin with, we are going to need a name. This name can be anything you like because it is mainly just a reference for the site so you could find it just in case you are working on several other sites the at same time.
I will call ours alien auto, and the next thing it is looking for is the HTTP address of our website. Now this will be a final location where our site is going to be located. We do not have to have this information at this point in time but it is not a bad idea to be thinking about this now, or even making some recommendations to the client to reserve a domain address.
I will just leave that blank and choose next. In the next section we are setting whether or not our website is going to be static or dynamic. A dynamic website uses a server technology to add data to our websites. Now we are not going to be doing that for our alien auto client, but it is interesting to note that Dreamweaver is fully capable of managing those sites as well.
We will leave this setting at no and click next again. Now this setting is very important because Dreamweaver is asking us where are the files for our website going to be stored on our hard drive. In our last lesson, we created a set of files right on the workflow project files, but as we named our site Dreamweaver creates a default location in your document folder.
I want to change that by clicking on the yellow folder icon and browsing to the location of our files. Now I am going to choose the workflow project files folder as the route location folder for our website. It is kind of important to note that this folder does include all the images and of course as we can see over here on the side, our color layout HTML file that we are starting with from our last lesson.
But it also includes all the assets that we are working with from before. Now that is okay, I prefer actually to keep everything together in my websites and we will find that Dreamweaver has a way of managing this as well when we will finally get to publishing our completed website on the end.
I will just click select and we will choose that as our local folder. Let us click the next button and that will take us to the last part of the Wizard where we are choosing where our remote server is located. Now once again this is something that you do not have to have setup at the beginning of your website creation.
The options available include local network sites and FTP sites. So you can use Dreamweaver to publish your final files whether your server is located right on your local network or whether you have to dialup remotely to connect to it. You will notice we have a couple of other options down here. If your company or your clients are using those ones, we can use Dreamweaver as well.
Now we are not really ready to set up any remote server. So I am going to leave this setting at none for right now. We can come back anytime we want to the site definition dialogue and make any changes to any of the settings that we have set up so far. I will just click next and we will be looking at a nice summary of all the settings we have built so far.
This is going to give us the website we need for now so I will just click done. Now you can see that the file window is changed over to show our local site that we are working on right now, and in the pull down menu, all the sites that we have defined will be listed here, so you can switch between them very easily.
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