Dreamweaver CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 20. Moving Your Site to the Internet

Building web pages 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 2014 includes many enhancements to make transferring files fast and efficient. Since Dreamweaver CS6, it has allowed multiple, simultaneous connections to a server. In other words, the old Dreamweaver transferred files one at a time, but the recent versions can send multiple files at once.

Adding a Remote Server

As you work on your website—whether you build the site from scratch or modify existing pages—you keep your files in a local root folder (see Up to Speed: Terms Worth Knowing), 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 19, 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. ...