Dreamweaver 8: Defining a New Site
Dreamweaver has always offered powerful "site management" tools that carefully check the integrity of your sites' links, locate site wide problems, and generally make maintaining multiple HTML and CSS files a more efficient and pleasurable experience. Dreamweaver's "I'll watch your back" attitude has saved countless Web designers from site-wide catastrophes and the public embarassment of missing graphics, broken links and the dreaded "404 File Not Found" error.
But you can't take advantage of Dreamweaver's total power unless you start off on the right foot. The most fundamental Dreamweaver concept is the local site. This is the location of your working site files--the "in-progress" site. In order for Dreamweaver to do much of its magic, you need to make sure you correctly identify your local site by defining it . I've taught Dreamweaver to hundreds of people over the years and this always seems to be one of the fundamental concepts that if you don't figure out how to do (it isn't hard) you don't get far with Dreamweaver.
To help those just starting out, I've put together a short Flash presentation that demonstrates the process and gives some clear direction on what you should avoid when working on a site in Dreamweaver.
Click here to view the presentation: Defining a Site in Dreamweaver 8.
For more detailed information on this topic see page 472 of Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual.
