Dreamweaver CC: The Missing Manual

Chapter 18. Moving Your Site to the Internet

Building web pages on your computer is a big accomplishment, but it’s not the whole job. Your beautifully designed and informative site will languish in obscurity unless you move it from your hard drive to a web server.

Fortunately, once your site is ready for prime time, you can put it on a server without ever leaving the comfort of Dreamweaver. The program includes simple commands for transferring files back and forth between the server and your desktop. All you need to do is provide Dreamweaver with the information it needs to connect to your server.

Note

Dreamweaver CC includes many enhancements to its file transfer abilities. It’s now a lot faster, and it allows multiple, simultaneous connections to a server. In other words, the old Dreamweaver transferred files one at a time, but the new one can send multiple files at once.

Adding a Remote Server

As you work on your website on your computer—whether you build the site from scratch or add and modify existing pages—you keep your files in a local root folder (see Creating a Web Page), often called a local site for short. You can think of a local site as a work-in-progress; you’ll routinely have partially finished documents sitting on your computer.

After you perfect and test your pages using the techniques described in Chapter 17, you’re ready to transfer those pages to a server that’s connected to the Internet; this server stores copies of your site files so it can dispense them to visitors. ...