The most common approach to creating a website using Dreamweaver is to create and edit pages on your local disk, and then upload copies of those pages to a remote web server to make them publicly available. It’s possible to use Dreamweaver in other ways (such as running a web server on your local computer, or uploading files to a staging server, or using a mounted disk as if it were your local disk), but the lessons in this guide assume that you’re working locally and then uploading to a remote server.



In Dreamweaver, the word site is used as shorthand to refer to any of the following things:



A website: a set of pages on a server, to be viewed by a visitor to the site using a web browser.

A remote site: the files on the server that make up a website, from your (the author’s) point of view rather than a visitor’s point of view.

A local site: the files on your local disk that correspond to the files in the remote site. You edit the files on your local disk, then upload them to the remote site.

A Dreamweaver site definition: a set of defining characteristics for a local site, plus information on how the local site corresponds to a remote site.

Normally, you would start creating a website by planning it: figuring out how many pages to create, what content appears on each page, and how the pages are connected to each other. In this lesson, though, the site you’re creating is a very simple one, so it doesn’t take much planning: it will consist of only two web pages, with links between them. So for this site, you can skip the planning, and proceed to creating a site definition.



You’ll create a site definition using the Site Definition dialog box. You can fill in this dialog box in either of two views: Basic or Advanced. The Basic approach guides you through site setup step by step. If you’d rather edit site information without guidance, you can click the Advanced tab at any time.



The following procedure describes how to set options in the Basic version of the dialog box, which is also known as the Site Definition Wizard. For details of how to set options in the Advanced version, click the Advanced tab and then click the Help button.



To define a site:

Choose Site > New Site. (That is, choose New Site from the Site menu.)

The Site Definition dialog box appears.



If the dialog box is showing the Advanced tab, click Basic.

The first screen of the Site Definition Wizard appears, asking you to enter a name for your site.



In the text box, enter a name to identify the site within Dreamweaver. The name can be anything you want. For example, you could name the site Global Car Rental.







Click Next to proceed to the next step.

The next screen of the wizard appears, asking if you want to work with a server technology.



Select the No option to indicate that for now, this site is a static site, with no dynamic pages.





To set up a site to create a web application, you would need to choose a dynamic document type—such as Macromedia ColdFusion, Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP), Microsoft ASP.NET, Sun JavaServer Pages (JSP), or PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP)—and then supply information about your application server.



Click Next to proceed to the next step.

The next screen of the wizard appears, asking how you want to work with your files.



Select the option labeled “Edit local copies on my machine, then upload to server when ready (recommended).”

There are a variety of ways that you can work with files during site development, but for the purposes of this lesson, choose this option.



The text box allows you to specify a folder on your local disk where Dreamweaver should store the local version of the site’s files. It’s easier to specify an accurate folder name if you browse to the folder rather than typing the path, so click the folder icon next to the text box.

The Choose Local Root Folder for Site dialog box appears.



In the Choose Local Root Folder for Site dialog box, start by navigating to a folder on your local disk where you can store all of your sites. Don’t click OK yet.

Note: This sites folder will eventually contain multiple sites, so don’t choose the sites folder as the local root folder. You will soon create a local root folder for this particular site inside the sites folder.



If you don’t already have a sites folder, create one now (using the folder-creation button in the Choose Local Root Folder for Site dialog box). Name the folder Sites. The recommended location for the sites folder depends on your operating system:



In Windows, if you don’t already have a place to store sites, create a folder at the top level of your C drive, and name the folder Sites. That is, the path to the folder is C:\Sites.

In Mac OS 9, if you don’t already have a place to store sites, create a folder at the top level of your disk drive named Sites.

In Mac OS X, your home folder (/Users/your_user_name) contains a folder named Documents. Navigate to that folder, and create a folder named Sites inside it.

Still in the Choose Local Root Folder for Site dialog box, create a new folder inside your Sites folder. Name the new folder GettingStarted, and click OK to dismiss the Choose Local Root Folder for Site dialog box.






Click Next to proceed to the next step.

The next screen of the wizard appears, asking how you connect to your remote server.



For now, choose None from the pop-up menu. Click Next to proceed to the next step.

The next screen of the wizard appears, showing a summary of your settings.



Click Done to finish.

You can set up information about your remote site later; for now, the local site information is all you need to start creating a page.



An alert appears to tell you that Dreamweaver will create a site cache. The site cache is a way for Dreamweaver to store information about the site, to make various site operations faster.



Click OK to allow Dreamweaver to create the site cache.

The Site panel now shows the new local root folder for your current site, and an icon to let you view all of your local disks in a hierarchical tree view. The icon is labeled Desktop (Windows) or Computer (Macintosh).







The Site panel normally shows all the files and folders in your site, but right now your site doesn’t contain any files or folders. When there are files in a site, the file list in the Site panel acts as a file manager, allowing you to copy, paste, delete, move, and open files just as you would on a computer desktop.



If you already have a set of local HTML files that you want to use to create a website, you can use the file browser in the Site panel to copy those files into your newly created site’s folder. However, you may want to complete the lessons in this guide using the files provided with Dreamweaver before you start using your own files.