Creating and Saving a New Web Site

If you already read the first part of this chapter and did enough idling, it's time to rev the engines and create your first Web site.

Here's how to create and save a Web site with one page: the default home page.

Tip 

The care and naming of Web sites

Because you most likely will create and save more than one Web site, you should think about how you want to organize your sites' files and folders now, when you're just getting started. If you don't have any other Web sites in your My Documents folder, Expression Web saves your first Web site's files in the folder My Documents\My Web Sites\mysite. When you create another new Web site, Expression Web adds another Web site folder inside My Documents\My Web Sites, named mysite2, and places your new site's files there. The next folder is named mysite3, and so on. Left to its own devices, Expression Web creates a folder-and-file structure for each new site inside the My Web Sites folder.

Although this method does keep everything nice and tidy and separate, the problem is that it doesn't scale well if you create more than a few sites. Is the site you created for Aunt Martha's knitting club mysite6 or mysite16? We suggest that you choose intuitive names for your Web sites that indicate what the sites are about (like knitclub or marthaknit). We also suggest that you store all your Web sites inside the My Web Sites folder, which keeps them separate from the morass of files in My Documents, sequestered in their own little Web site world.

To create and save your first Web site, follow these steps:

1. With Expression Web running, choose File New Web Site.

   You can also click the drop-down arrow to the right of the New Document button on the Common (or Standard) toolbar and choose Web Site.

   The New dialog box appears with the Web Site tab displayed, as shown in Figure 1-5. The General and One Page Web Site options are selected. The Description box displays a helpful little blurb about what the selected options do.

   
   Figure 1-5: The New dialog box.

   The Specify the Location of the New Web Site text box displays the full path and default folder name of the Web site. If you have no other Web sites in My Documents, Expression Web assumes that you want to create a unique folder for your Web site within the My Web Sites folder. In this case, the path probably looks something like this: C:\Documents and Settings\your user name\My Documents\My Web Sites\mysite (or mysite2 or mysite3, for example).

   Note 

   If you share a computer with other people and use the Windows system of users and passwords to maintain separate settings, the My Documents folder is located inside the Documents and Settings folder, in a subfolder identified by your username.

2. Type over the default folder name that Expression Web has assigned for the Web site, and enter your own, unique folder name.

   The easiest way to do this is to click twice at the end of the path shown in the Specify the Location of the New Web Site text box and press the Backspace key to erase the default folder name (leave the \ in place). Then type a name for your Web site folder.

   Tip 

   When naming folders, try to use only lowercase letters and underscores (_) rather than spaces. Current standards require that filenames and pathnames be in all lowercase; whenever you are working with anything Web related, it just makes good sense to follow this simple rule. Also, try keeping your folder names short. See the earlier sidebar "The Care and naming of Web sites" for more information.

   The full path should now look something like this: C:\Documents and Settings\your name\My Documents\My Web Sites\folder_name, where folder_name is your Web site name.

3. Click OK.

   The dialog box closes, and Expression Web opens a new workspace with your Web site and its default.htm home page (if you chose to create a one-page Web site).

To create additional Web sites, follow these steps again. Each new site opens in its own workspace window.

Tip 

When you launch Expression Web, it opens the last Web site you were working on, to the last page you had open.

Congratulations-you created your first Web site! You're now ready to take the next step, which could be in any number of directions:

• If you want to get to work adding content to your new home page, go to Chapter 3, which talks about text, that most fundamental element of most Web pages.

• To add more Web pages to your Web site, go to Chapter 2.

• If you're not sure where to go from here, read on.