I am guessing you are probably more anxious to start using this new program than fiddling with all the preferences. So for now let's dive right in and create a new site and a new page. First I am going to close the sites that I have open in each of these programs. In Dreamweaver there are number of ways to close a site, but for now I am just going to close the document that I have open already. In GoLive and I am just going to click on the window back here to bring GoLive up, I am going to close this site by choosing File, Close.
You are probably already familiar with how you create a new site in GoLive, but just to make sure you know what we are comparing. In GoLive you will find this under File, New, you choose Site, Create Site and then you have a choice of creating a new site, a new site from existing content or from the Site Locater file. I am going to create a Blank Site and you get to name your site you GoLive, I will just call it something simple My New GoLive Site.
You can browse through the site where you want to save this new folder. I am not going to worry about Version Control or FTP settings, that's the publishing options here. I just want to finish so that you can see when you create a new site in GoLive you automatically start with an Index Page and aBasic.css file. I am going to go ahead and close this one there just to make sure that I have really closed out of that site and we are now working just on the new site in GoLive. By the way if you have ever wondered why GoLive always creates a new page called index.html when you create a new site? That's because most commercial web servers are setup to display the index.html file first when a browser comes to your website.
If you are using a Windows based server, you might need to call your home page default.html. Either way you want to double check with your web hosting service. The GoLive takes this extra step when you create a new site and gives you a basic CSS external style sheet and a blank file called Index.html. Now let's switch over to Dreamweaver and see how that process is different.
Some of the most dramatic differences between Dreamweaver and GoLive have to do with the site setup process and how files are organized. So pay special attention here. If you choose File, New like we just did in GoLive, you will see a New Document window that's similar, but you will not find a way to create a new site. You can create lots of different kinds of pages in the New Document window, but before you start doing that it's always good practice to define your site in Dreamweaver first and you do that in a different place in the interface.
So before we create a new page the first thing you should do is go to the Site, New Site option. The Site Definition Window has two tabs at the top. Basic, which gives you are wizard that walks you through this process and Advanced, which I prefer because it lets me see everything I am doing at once. Similar to what we just did in GoLive, the first thing you will do is name your website. So I am going to call this one My new Dreamweaver Site. And similar to GoLive you are going to designate a local root folder that's the main folder where you will store all of the files in sub folders of your site.
If you want to create a new site in Dreamweaver and specify where that new folder is located at the same time, use this little icon to the right here that looks like a file folder. I am going to save my new folder on the Desktop in my Project Files in my Lesson 01 folder just to keep this tidy. And I am going to create a new folder as I define this site. This lets me control exactly what this folder is called and where it's saved on my hard drive. I will just call this New Dreamweaver Site. By the way if you are on a PC, you want to use the icon in the top right conner of this dialog to create a new folder here.
Notice too that I have a new folder name and I have a site name and those are two different things. The site name is just used by Dreamweaver to identify my site. The folder name is the name of the actual folder that I am creating. So I have created the folder, I have put it where I want and now I am choosing it in Dreamweaver and all you are really doing in a site setup process is indicating to Dreamweaver where your local root folder is so that Dreamweaver can manage all of the links and inserted images and other elements in your site.
Speaking of images you can also designate an Images folder. Now you don't have to do this, but there are some benefits to making sure that you have an images folder in your site folder. So my site folder is selected, now I am going to create another new folder inside it and I am going to call this one Images. Now the Dreamweaver knows where I like to keep my images within my main root folder.
You can store images elsewhere in your main root folder, but if Dreamweaver needs to copy any images into the folder for you this is where it will put them. So I have my main root folder, I have my images folder, you can now add a web address if you have one, if you know what address you are going to be using you can type in the www etcetera. But if you are only working locally as we are doing for this test site, you can leave this blank.
You also have an option of Site Root or Document relative links. Document is the default and if you are not ever sure of the difference, Document is the fine choice. There are some advantages to Site Root, especially if you are using really advanced features. And I will say if you are working with a team of other developers you should ask them the question, do they prefer Site Root or Document linking? And make sure you specify this according to what the other members of your team are using.
Most importantly you want to make sure all of the links in your site are consistently set using one or other of these options. Case-sensitive link checking; I always like to check. That just makes sure that any links that are set in your site match in case as well as name and that won't really matter if you are using a Macintosh or a PC but if you upload your site to a Unix server when you are done depending on the server software you are using your links may get broken if they don't match in case.
When you create links in Dreamweaver it will make sure that the case matches, but if you ever change a filename outside of Dreamweaver the link checking features will only check for case if you have this checked. So I routinely check it even though it's probably a little overly cautious.
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