Defining a site in Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver defines a site as a set of linked documents with shared attributes, such as related topics, similar design, or shared purpose. A site would normally consist of the files associated with a web address. The site manager is the tool used for crating and managing the site structure. It provides for the creation of a remote site on a file server and a duplicate of the remote site on a file server and a duplicate of the remote site on a local computer.
Before the developer begins to work on the Web pages, he or she should devote time to planning the content and the structure of the site, and to the constructions will be discussed here, but for an in-depth discussion of site design and preplanning you may wish to refer to the Yale Guide to web Page Design by Patrcik Lynch . It is an excellent reference and is free on the Web.

Planning and Setting Up You Site

When Planning your site in Dreamweaver, you must consider three basic issues at the outset: the target audience, browser compatibility, site structure, and site assets.

Target Audience

The target audience  is a fundamental consideration in all website design. You will need to answer several questions to determine the audience characteristics. For example, is the audience likely to be diverse? If it is, then you will have develop to the lowest common denominator in terms of user technical capability. Will the audience most likely have broadband access to the Internet? If so, then you can include various forms of multimedia. Will the audience be predominantly windows users? What screen resolution will the audience likely be using? These questions will affect the way the site is designed and deployed and should be determined before the actual web page development occurs.

Browser

The browser that will be used should also be a major consideration. The two most prominent browsers used today are Netscape and Internet Explorer. Some components of Web pages will behave differently in these two browsers. Cross-browser compability should therfore be an issue. When you are designing the Web page, it should be tested in both browsers to determine that it behaves properly in the two environments.

site structure and Assets

The structure of the site will be determined in large part by the complexity of the Web page; however, you will need to address a few design considerations for all websites regardless of size. It will be converinment and useful to store your site assets in a common directory. In this text, the term assets will refer to all non-HTML-type object and should be placed in a separate folder in your site. Remember also, when you set up the site in Dreamweaver, the local and remote sites should have the exact same structure.

In this text, we discuss the concepts of Dreamweaver through a sample e-commerce site: Collegiate Apparel Online (GAO), a fictional online store that sells college-related clothing. This store will be used as a running example throughtout the text and will be the starting point for an exercise that will take you through the basics of desgning a site to building and posting a Web page.

Setting Up the site from Scratch

First, you will need to create the directory structure that will be used in the running case. You can create the structure by copying the folders from the student disk to the root directory of your hard drive.

To set up the site in Dreamweaver, follow these steps :

• Click the site button on teh launcher toolbar
• Click the menu item site -> New site.
• In the site Name field, type CAO. Then change the local root folder to the location on your hard drive that corresponds to folders that you created from the student disk. In the example case, this is: D:\dreamweaver Project\Collegiate Apparel Online\CAO site.
• Do not worry about an HTTP address right now, but it will be important in the future. However, make sure that you have enabled the Cache. This will be important to using the Assets panel in the future.
• Click Remote Info in the Category listing. On teh Acces drop-down menu,choose FTP.
• You will need to know your own FTP host directory and login information for this section. Now, click Design Notes. If you are working on a large project, this is something that you want to make active. Making Design Notes active enables a team to share information about changes, standards, spesifications, and other important aspects of the project.

The site is now defined sufficiently to begin using it, so press OK to accept the definition as shown. When you click OK, the Site Files window opens. This will be the interface into the projects.