Introduction to GoLive CS2

Like the other applications in the Creative Suite, GoLive helps you when you first open the application by greeting you with a few basic choices in the Welcome dialog box: What's New in GoLive, Tutorials, and Cool Extras all do as their names describe; New Document and Open Document give you a jump-start for using GoLive for your work. If you prefer not to have this dialog box salute you every time you open the application, you can disable it by unchecking Show This Dialog at Startup in the lower-left corner (see Figure 9.1). No worries; if you change your mind, you can turn it back on by choosing Help, Welcome Screen.

Figure 9.1. GoLive's welcome screen offers a friendly welcome to the application. Hold down the Open Document button for a moment to access a list of recently used files.

If you choose New Document, you get GoLive's new New dialog box (yes, you read that right). The New dialog box is a fantastic new function that enables you to easily create just about anything that GoLive supports, be it a new blank generic HTML page or an entire site. If you choose to create a new site, you invoke the GoLive Site Wizard, which steps you through the creation of a site. We cover the steps in the wizard shortly, but for now, you need to know only this: To take advantage of GoLive's incredibly powerful site-management and link-tracking tools, you always need to work from within a site window, and that is exactly what the Site Wizard creates. So forgo the single new page in favor of a new site, and you'll be on the right track. You will, of course, be able to create new pages from within your site.

Let's define "site" at this point. A site, in GoLive-speak, consists of the following things: a site file, a web-content folder, a web-data folder, and a web-settings folder. These four items are automatically created on your hard drive whenever you create a new GoLive site or import an existing site into GoLive, and they are neatly tucked into an umbrella folder that keeps them all together. Double-clicking on a site file opens it in a site window. The site file is the shepherd that keeps track of the sheep, the sheep being the other three folders and any items included in them.

By the Way

Using GoLive, you can create as many sites as you want. You can have more than one site window at a time, and you can even drag and drop from one to another. Use caution when working with more than one site window at a time, though. It's very easy to inadvertently save work into the wrong one, and it can be a real pain to put things right again. If you are a novice at GoLive, you are better off opening only one site file at a time.