Every website begins with the single page. Visitors are first greeted by the front page or the home page of most websites and that usually good place to start building.
Dreamweaver makes building a homepage easy. When the program opens, you see a Start Screen with shortcuts to many handy features for creating new pages. If you want to create a simple blank webpage, just choose html from the Create New List in the middle row. If you are creating a dynamic site, you may choose Cold Fusion, PHP, or one of the ASP options. If you do not even know what those options are or you are confused by those acronyms, you probably will not need to use them. But, you can find more information about these in the last part of this video. So you can create a new page by clicking html here in the short cut menu or if you got a page already open or at anytime, you can just go to File, New then the New Document Dialog, make sure you are set to basic page, html and you now created the most basic html page.
Two things I recommend you do right away when you create a new page. The first one is to give your document a title and the second one is to save it. The document title is what appears at the very top of your screen when you look at a page in a browser. These words would not actually display in the body of your page but not only do they appear at the top of the screen in the browser, they are also the words that get saved when somebody bookmarks your page. So titles are really important and I am always embarrassed for people when I am surfing the web and I see untitled document at the top of their website because it is a really important thing. So again, on the theme, I am going to just call this my website but you can call it anything you want. To save the file, simply File, Save or if you like the Key command, just use Control S on the PC or command S on the Mac.
Now, when you name a file that is going to be used on the web, it is very important that you use no spaces and no special characters. This again has to do with the fact that most of the web serves or UNIX and they do not like spaces and special characters. The other thing that is a little tricky about naming web pages is that the first page, that homepage of your website should be called index.html. Why index.html? Okay, it is a little arbitrary. I admit it. But, some great geek in the world out there decided that Index should be the name of the main page. So web servers are set up to deliver index first when a browser lands there. So, if my domain name is jcwarner.com and the first page of my site is index.html, then when you type jcwarner.com into a browser, you immediately go to index.html. If I did not create an index file, then you would actually have to type jcwarner.com/ whatever that page is. So always make sure the first file in your website is called index and that all of the files and folders within your website are one word, no spaces, and no special characters.
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