Dreamweaver in a Nutshell

Preparing an Existing Site for Use

How do you use Dreamweaver to manage an existing site? Whether you’ve created an entire site with another site-management tool such as FrontPage or simply created some HTML files in another program, it’s easy to “import” an existing site into Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver 4 also reads site definition files from earlier versions of Dreamweaver.

You don’t literally import your existing site files into Dreamweaver. Instead, you tell Dreamweaver about your existing site by creating a site definition. The next section ensures that you have your web site prepared for use within Dreamweaver so you can benefit from the later advice on checking and fixing broken links. See the Macromedia TechNote 14031 “How to convert an existing site into a Dreamweaver site” for additional details, including how to convert from FrontPage. The TechNote can be found at http://www.macromedia.com/support/dreamweaver/ts/documents/existing_site.htm.

Refer to Section 7.1 in Chapter 7, especially when using HTML files from another program.

Importing an Existing Site

If you already have a local copy of your web site on your hard drive, you can create a site definition for it, as described in Section 6.2 earlier in this chapter. (If you modify a file without having defined the site, relative links will be changed to absolute file:/// links.) If you don’t have a copy of your site on your local drive already, you can use Dreamweaver to download an entire site from a remote server. To ...