So I am going to go for the easy one, the starter pages and let Macromedia do most of the work for me here and show you just how easy it is to whip up a new site. I am going to take us on a little tropical adventure or at least go traveling. We are going to start with the home page, the travel home page, so I am in the new document, you can get this from File, New or from that starter page. Click Travel, double click to open it. Dreamweaver right away is going to warn you that you have not defined a site for this. If you have defined sites and you are creating a new site with templates you would want to do this step before you start creating the templates because you want each site to be defined separately. So remember to define a site you are going to click Manage Sites here. This is a new site that we are defining and again, I really do not care for this wizard but if you like wizards, you can walk through all of the steps you need here. I prefer to go the advance tab and see everything I am doing once. I am going to call this travel.
The name of your site again can be anything you want, you do not even have to worry about spaces and special characters here so you can even say Travel California because that is what I am going to make this about. You want to find the main folder. Now if you are creating a new site and it does not have a folder yet, you are going to have to create the folder so I am going to start by going to the desktop were I have saved the lesson files. You can save your new folder wherever you want. We are in Part One Lesson Four and I am going to create a new folder here call it “Travel”, Create and I am going to identify this just by choosing it as the main folder of my website.
While I am at it, I am going to create an images folder, same thing just create, a new folder, call it Images. This just tells Dreamweaver where you should save any images as you are creating these sites. I do not have a domain name yet for this. This is a site I want to create about travel but I have not registered a domain name yet so I am just going to leave this blank. It is really not necessary to put that in there yet. I am going to keep case sensitive link checking on because I want to make sure it will work on a UNIX server and then I am going to enable the cache so that Dreamweaver can work as efficiently as possible, click okay” and then click Done. I am going to save this page using Command S or Control S on the PC. And remember now, this is the first page of my website, the home page of my website and as I mentioned in an earlier lesson, we always want to name that. Index, Save. Now remember you do that for the server because the server delivers index. Unless you are using an unusual server that is set for something else, most web servers will deliver the index file first in a website. Now this copy dependent files dialog is because there are a number of files related to this template that Dreamweaver knows need to go into your site in order for this to work. That is the image up here and the image down here and a few space or gifs that hold all these things in place. So just say, Yes, Copy. And, Dreamweaver will automatically insert those into the files menu and into the main folder of the website that you have set up.
Now these templates are remarkably easy to use because most of it is just text that you want to replace. I am going to call this Travel California. This tag line is optional. You could just delete it if you want. I am actually going to use this space and I am not quite sure why it does not want to highlight that last E but I think it will go away when I type here. So you might want a welcome message here. You might want to just leave the word Welcome! Again, you are tailoring this design to whatever content you want. You can keep as much or as little of this as you go along. Similarly, you can change these from destinations, airfare and cruises so maybe since I want to focus on flying and driving and not cruises, I might change this to beaches, specials, and contact maybe I like those.
You can make that
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