The first thing you do when you begin a site in Dreamweaver is define a site root folder, as discussed in Chapter 2. You tell Dreamweaver where you're keeping all your site files. Dreamweaver rewards you for sharing the information by making all sorts of cool site-wide tools available to speed up your workflow and make your life easier. In seconds, Dreamweaver's site management tools can make changes to every file in your local site root folderchanges that would take you much longer done one file at a time. We'll cover two of those timesaving whole-site tools, templates and libraries, in this chapter. In addition, you'll learn how to create timesaving bits of reusable code called snippets. You access templates and Library items from the Assets panel. Snippets have a separate panel. Before getting into the details, some brief definitions are in order. Templates are like master page designs. They create a uniform page design for a site, while allowing certain material on each page to be customized for individual pages. Library items are not full pages, but reusable objects with text, code, images, or other elements that you insert in documents. For example, you can create a navigation bar as a Library item. Updating either a template or a Library item results in the automatic updating of any page in the entire site that is attached to the template or library. Snippets are custom-built code samples that you find useful and save for quick insertion. Changing a snippet doesn't have any site-wide effects.
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