Before you create your first page in Dreamweaver, it is important to go through the site definition process which involves setting up a root website folder where you will store all of the files, images, multimedia files, everything that will go in your website to go in that main root folder.
If you are creating a completely new site, you can do that by choosing site, new site. In the site definition dialogue, I prefer to work with the advanced options. If you open this dialogue and you see the basic screen, just click on the advanced tab at the top and you should open the same dialogue that I have opened here. And in the site definition dialogue box, you want to first give your site a name. You can name your site anything you want. I am going to call this one “Happy Birthday”. Okay. So maybe it is not your birthday but humor me as we go along with this lesson.
The next thing on the site definition is probably the most important thing. It is the local root folder. When you create a new site in Dreamweaver, you will notice that if I click on this little icon over here on the right—by the way, anytime you see one of these little yellow folder icons, that indicates that it is a browse button, meaning that if you click on it, you will be able to browse for a file or folder. In this case, when I click on the browse icon, I get a dialogue that lets me choose the local root folder for my website. Remember, this is the folder where you are going to store all of the files for all of the pages and images in your site. Dreamweaver automatically creates a new empty folder and gives it a generic name, in this case, Unnamed Site 2, when you create a new site.
You can change the name of that folder. You can select a different folder or you can create a new folder in a different place on your hard drive. So that is what I am going to do. I am going to go into the desktop, and now into my lesson files, into part one, into lesson two, and I am going to create a new folder here in lesson two where I will store all of the files for this website. If you are on the Macintosh, it will do exactly the same thing. Just use the icons and tools on the map to create a new folder as I am here on a PC. You can create this new folder anywhere you want in your hard drive. But to keep things organized, I am going to create a new folder here just clicking on the create new folder icon and I am going to give it a name. Now, you can name this folder anything you want so I am going to call it “Happy Birthday”. And then, you want to select that folder. And you will notice this button here, it says “open”. As soon as you have opened it, it changes to select. And what you are really doing here is selecting the folder that you just created called Happy Birthday. And when I click on select, you will see that Dreamweaver has now inserted that folder and have given me the path on my hard drive and designated that as the local root folder.
Throughout this lesson, I will be doing this over and over again as we set up new sites at the beginning of each lesson. If this is still seeming a little confusing, I am sure that you will get the hang of it soon. But, the key thing to get clear here is that you are creating one folder and telling Dreamweaver where it is so that Dreamweaver can keep track of all of the files on your sites.
Now, you also have an option to set up a default images folder. That is a choice that you can make. You don’t have to have an images folder and you certainly don’t have to have only one images folder. But the advantage of setting up an images folder is that if you link to images that are not inside your root folder, Dreamweaver will copy those images into whatever folder you designate as the images folder.
So, since I don’t yet have an images folder, I am going to do almost the same thing that I just did. So, you will just click on the yellow folder icon again, and since we just selected the Happy Birthday folder as our main root folder, Dreamweaver puts us right into that folder already. So now, you want to create another new folder and I am going t
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