Dreamweaver CS4 For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Opening and Creating Sites

In This Chapter

• Opening an existing Web site

• Creating a new Web site

• Making new pages

• Inserting and formatting text

• Creating links

If you're ready to dive in and start building a Web site, you've come to the right place. If you're working on an existing site and need to make changes, this is also the place to start because in this chapter, you discover an important preliminary step — the site definition process, which enables Dreamweaver to keep track of the images and links in your site. After you've completed the site definition process, you're ready to create Web pages, insert text and images, set links, and more. (You discover how to do all those things later in this chapter, too.) But whatever you do, don't skip the first step of defining a site — it only takes a minute or two.

Tip

Although you can use Dreamweaver without doing this initial site definition, you run the risk of breaking links when you upload your site, and then many of Dreamweaver's features, such as automated link checking and the Library, won't work at all.

Setting Up a New or Existing Site

The first thing to understand about the site definition process is that you need to store all your site's resources in one local root folder on your hard drive and identify the folder in Dreamweaver. That's because all the elements of your site must remain in the same relative location on your hard drive as they are on your Web server in order for your links, images, and other elements to work ...