Understanding Local and Remote Sites

Dreamweaver 8 can do a great job of helping you manage all the files and folders that make up your Web site, but for the best results, you'll need to use the program's site management tools to set up and maintain the site. First, you need to understand some of the terminology Dreamweaver uses for sites. You'll want to build and test your Web site within a single folder on your hard disk, which Dreamweaver calls the local root folder . This folder contains all of the files and folders that make up the site. For example, let's say that you're building a company site that has two sections in it, one for product information (called products ), and the other for information about the company (called companyinfo ). Each of the two sections gets its own folder. These folders are located inside the local root folder (which in this example I'm calling MyCompany ). Because each section shares some of the same graphic images, there is also an images folder in the local root folder. The site structure would look something like Figure 2.1 . With one exception, each of the Web pages that you build for the site will go into either the products or companyinfo folder. The exception is the main site page (the one that people see when they load your site in their browsers). That's called the index page , and it usually goes in the local root folder (which is also called the local site ).

Figure 2.1. The top folder here is the local root folder, which contains all of the files and folders that make up the Web site.

Static versus Dynamic Sites

There are two main kinds of Web sites that you can create in Dreamweaver: static sites, where you build all of the pages of the site on your local machine, then upload them to the Web server; and dynamic sites, in which all the pages are created from information drawn from a database. The content from a dynamic page is created when the user loads the page. Many e-commerce sites are dynamic sites; for example, when you go to Amazon.com and see pages that greet you by name and offer personalized recommendations, those pages are created and served just for you, based on the programming of Amazon's database.

We're covering how to build static sites with Dreamweaver in this book. When we run into options that Dreamweaver offers to work with dynamic sites, we'll mention that, but we generally will not cover those options in detail in this book. If you're interested in using Dreamweaver to create dynamic pages, check out Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 Advanced for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickPro Guide , by Lucinda Dykes.

After you build the pages for your site, you will use Dreamweaver to copy all of the files and folders (usually over the Internet) to the Web server. Dreamweaver replicates the folder structure from your hard disk on the Web server, so the site's structure and all of the links between the pages are preserved. Dreamweaver refers to the copy of the site on the Web server as the remote site . The remote site should always be a mirror image of your local site, and Dreamweaver has tools that can synchronize the two sites (you'll learn more about that later in this chapter and in Chapter 16).

Tips

• Strictly speaking, you don't have to create all of your site's files within the local root folder. But if you do not, Dreamweaver will often put up dialogs complaining that files aren't in a local site, and you'll lose access to very useful Dreamweaver features, such as the ability to automatically update all links to a file that has been moved to another location in the site. We strongly recommend that you always build your pages in a local site, and keep all of the elements that make up those pages in the local root folder.

• If you were using Dreamweaver's ability to work with sites built using a database, you could have a third copy of your site on a testing or staging server .