Chapter4.Dreamweaver Site Management

Chapter 4. Dreamweaver Site Management

IN THIS CHAPTER

• The Importance of Defining Sites in Dreamweaver

• Defining a New Site in Dreamweaver

• The Site Definition Window

• Managing a Website in Dreamweaver

• The Site Panel

• Site Management Options

• Advanced Site Management Options

In the previous chapter, you learned how to build a simple web page in Dreamweaver. Some of the more notable concepts you learned were page formatting, images, and linking. Although it seems obvious that Dreamweaver's sole purpose is to create web pages, truthfully, any web page editor can provide a developer with this functionality. What truly makes Dreamweaver unique and powerful at the same time are features and functionality built into its framework for managing your web pages, and more importantly, your websites. Site management you ask? Arguably the most important aspect of Dreamweaver, regardless of version, is site management. Site management, which is the process of administering websites within the framework of Dreamweaver, affords developers many benefits, including the ability to change website links across an entire site, check for and fix broken links across an entire website, establish a connection and upload files to a remote web hosting provider, work with site maps, and more. As you will see in this chapter, by simply establishing a reference (defining a site) between Dreamweaver and the site files on your computer, Dreamweaver greatly expands its feature set to include functionality to help you manage your web pages and websites.

You can work with the examples in this chapter by downloading the files from www.dreamweaverunleashed.com. You'll want to save the files for Chapter 4 in an easy-to-find location. I'll place mine in C:\Dorknozzle\Chapter04. For this chapter, three files (helpdesk.htm, employeestore.htm, and admin.htm) have been added to the list. Although these files are basically empty, they will help us work with the examples in this chapter better.