Dreamweaver Assignment 5 – Defining a Site in Dreamweaver

Photo credit: tifotter, uploaded via Flickr, Creative Commons License

5.1 Introduction and Benefits: 

The process of defining a site within Dreamweaver consists of defining the location of all of ones assets needed to render the website  (graphics, databases, style sheets, etc).  Once Dreamweaver knows where everything is, it can keep track of it all during the process of building and editing the site design.  However, it can only do so if one manipulates those assets from within Dreamweaver itself.  Making changes to the file system at the OS level results in Dreamweaver falling out-of-the-loop, creating headaches for the designer.  Working from with the files panel in Dreamweaver ensures that the application remains up-to-speed with any asset manipulation occurring during the build process.

5.2 Course Setup:

Here we create a new root folder to hold our assets for a web site as described in the preceding section.  At the beginning of this video clip, our tutor has what appears to be a file browser window open, sitting atop the work area of the Dreamweaver application window.  This leaves one wondering what menu option or action prompted the file browser window to open within Dreamweaver.  However, after some consideration, it appears that perhaps the tutor simply launched an instance of windows explorer to create a root folder.  The explorer window was not maximized, and happened to be sitting in front of the maximized Dreamweaver window in the background, creating the illusion that the window had been launched from within the application itself.  That’s my interpretation, anyway.

Regardless, apparently all we are doing here is creating a folder to serve as the root for our website.  ‘Nuff said.

5.3 Defining a Site in Dreamweaver:

Having created a root folder in the OS environment to store our project files, we now move to the Dreamweaver application to tag this folder as such.  From the site menu, we select manage sites, and then select new from the resulting dialogue box.  We than get a second dialogue box, affording us the opportunity to name the site, and select the root folder we wish to use.

After accepting this assignment and closing our dialogue boxes, we return to the application and note that the newly defined root folder is apparent in our files panel. 

***IMPORTANT***  From this point on, any importing, moving or copying of file assets to be used in the site must done from within the files panel in the Dreamweaver application!  Failure to do so will result in the application losing track of the asset inventory.

5.4 Using the Files Panel:

The files panel functions much like the file browser or explorer window in the OS.  One can navigate folders, drag-and-drop files, make connections to remote network drives, as well as create, rename and delete folders and files.  Once again, all of these operations should be performed from within this interface, rather than at the OS level.

The Files Panel.