Site definition in Dreamweaver

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Course info

34 lessons / 3 hours

Overview

Dreamweaver (and web design in general) is such a hard program to teach yourself. We know, because as Dreamweaver trainers we have all taught ourselves. We wish we had a resource like this when we were learning.

Hand coding a website from scratch is now a thing of the past. Web designers use tools like Dreamweaver to a lot of the heavy lifting. We imagine this is your first website build and we're glad we're here to help make this process a little less troublesome. 

Who should use this?

Anyone that is brand new to Dreamweaver and anyone brand new to web design in general. If you're reasonably experienced in web design you might find this course a little slow going.

What do you need?

  • You'll need a laptop (Mac or PC)
  • Dreamweaver CC installed. Dreamweaver can be downloaded from theAdobe website here.

Can I use this tutorial with Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, CS5 or CS6?

No. Unfortunately there were some fundamental changes in the Dreamweaver CC update that makes CC and previous versions very different.

Remember you can download Dreamweaver CC free for 30 days. Don't worry - after your free trial has expired your files will still be updatable using any other web design program.

If you like the tutorials we'd love you to like, share and tweet it. We'd be very grateful.

Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Welcome to the Dreamweaver tutorial. My name is Daniel Walter Scott,  and I'm a trainer here at Bring Your Own Laptop. And this course is designed for people that have never used,  uh, Dreamweaver before or a new to web design. And the topic we're covering in this session is how  to define a website. Okay? So this is the first step when it comes  to creating your website in Dreamweaver.

Um, what happens is, in a website, you need to have all  of your elements of the website in one folder. Unlike some other professions like graphic design  where you get to have images and text  and logos all over your hard drive, okay? To design a website, you need  to keep everything in the same folder  and they call it your local folder, okay? And what you need to do is tell Dreamweaver using its  site function, okay? You define it site and tell it  where this local site folder is kept. Okay?

So let's do that together now. So the first thing we're gonna do is go up to site, okay? And go to new site. You'll need a new site definition  for every new website you're working on. If you are working on only one website,  you've got one website to create or update. You'll only have to do this once.

Me as a freelance web designer, I have lots  of these sites defined all over my hard drive in different  places, okay? So we give the site a name. I'm gonna call this one, uh, example  tutorial, okay? This is where you give it a name, uh, the client name  or the job description, something like that. Useful for you to describe it. Um, different from other websites on your, um, Dreamweaver.

This where it says local site folder, this is  where on your hard drive, your website's gonna be kept. So for me, I'm going to click on browse folder. I'm using a Mac. Uh,  it doesn't matter whether you're using a PC or a Mac. And I'm gonna put a new folder  on my desktop, okay? You might keep yours in your documents.

I'm gonna call this example tutorial  and click create, then click choose. So I'll hold it, it's site name, which is example tutorial. Okay? And I have given it, I've told it  where I'm gonna keep this website. So every file that I need to design now needs  to go inside this folder. Last thing I need to do is look at the advanced settings,  click on the word advanced settings.

If that doesn't work, click on the word local info. And you should get this right hand side looking like mine. Last thing we need to do is tell Dreamweaver where we'd like  to keep our default folders, uh, sorry,  our default images folder. So to do that, let's click on browse. Now, you could keep all your images, um, in your, just the,  just the place that we decided  before, which is called the example tutorial folder. But it's very common to have a sub folder in your website.

And it's either called images  or some people like to call it IMG. It's up to you, okay? It should be used as a lowercase. Okay? So it should be a lowercase I,  and whatever you name it, make sure  that you use the naming convention that has no spaces, okay? So don't have a space included in that list, okay?

You can see here, don't use things like amand or asterisks  or hash symbols or question marks. These can all throw up problems with your website. So make sure if you do decide to have a space, okay,  use a hyphen instead. You could use an underscore,  but a hyphens is more commonly used. Okay? So I'm just gonna call my folder  images with a lowercase.

I click create. Okay? And I'm gonna click choose. So I've told it in the site one at the top here,  the name I've told it where on my hydro it's gonna be kept. And, and, uh, advanced settings, local info. I've told it where the images are gonna be  stored from my website.

And that's all we need to do now. Alright, see you the next tutorial.
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