How to setup a simple site in Dreamweaver

Setting up a site environment in Dreamweaver is very easy and it’s always better when creating more than a simple HTML page. For example, if you also use Dreamweaver extensions to ease up the work, they usually create additional files and folders which should be placed in a “site” environment.

Locating the Site settings menu

Open Dreamweaver, and in the upper menu, go to Site, select New site (like in the picture below):

Basic tab

In the Basic tab enter the name for your site and leave everything else on default; don’t write anything to the http address, just leave it like it is and press Next.

On the next step select “No, I do not want to use a server technology”. Because we are building just a simple site we do not need a server technology (PHP). We have covered the server side setting in this tutorial. Press next.

Editing files

Now we are at Part 3, Editing files, just select Edit local copies on my machine, then upload to server when ready. This is the simpler way; if you select edit directly on server you have to set the details for ftp connection and it’s a bit annoying as each time you want to test you need to upload the files on the live server.

The next thing you have to change is the folder where you want to store the files for your site, I’ve created a folder on my desktop with the same name as the site “creative dw menus”, browse for the folder, press open, then press select. Make sure the path for the folder is correct and press Next.

On the next step, how do you connect to your remote server select None from the drop down, and press Next.

Summary details

Dreamweaver will show a final window, with the summary details, showing you the local info, the site name, the local root folder, the remote info, should be “Acces: I’ll set this up later.”, the testing server should say the same thing. If everything is correct press Done.

Dreamweaver will start building the cache files, if you already have any files in the folders (like in my example).

Hope you enjoyed it and managed to create your first site in Dreamweaver.