Setting Up Site Folders

This tutorial illustrates setting up site folders in Dreamweaver CS5.

All of the files associated with a web site are kept in a set of folders. These folders are all built on the basis of a root folder, and in effect they are all sub-folders of the root folder.

When you're working on a web site on your PC the root folder is called the local root. As you saw earlier, for Site1 I specified my local root using the Site Setup dialog.

Once I have specified a local root, I will save all of my files in the local root folder or in one of its sub-folders. This whole collection of folders and files is usually referred to as my local site.

However, when users access my web site via the Internet they won't be accessing the files in the local root and its sub-folders. They don't have access to my PC, and even if they did I wouldn't want them accessing the files I'm still working on!

So, the version that users see will be in another folder structure that is essentially a copy of my local one. For this "copy" structure the root folder is referred to as the remote root, and the site is referred to as the remote site.

In most cases, and particularly for home users and small businesses, the remote site will usually be on a server (computer) belonging to a web hosting company, whose business is - basically - to provide space for remote sites and to make those sites available to Internet users.

Referring back to the Site Setup dialog again, the Servers option lets you specify where your remote site is located.

However, there's no need to do that until you're ready to publish your web site, i.e. to make it available to Internet users. Publishing your web site means to upload your files from the root folder on your computer to the root folder on your web server and make them available on the Web.

When you are ready to publish your site, you can probably work out that you'll need to copy all the files from your local site to your remote site, and that's something we will look at in detail later.

When I do have my remote site setup, the contents of the Servers page might look something like this.

As you may know, FTP (File Transport Protocol) is typically the mechanism used to copy a local site to a remote site.

In many situations there is a third type of site that can be very important, and that is a testing site. When we have produced a new version of our site locally, we may want or need to test it in a particular way before we publish it. A typical reason for this is if we have dynamic content on our pages and we need to make sure that all of the data is being retrieved and displayed correctly from a database, for example..

Note the Testing check box here to indicate that a server is a testing server.

Finally, note that it is usually possible to use Dreamweaver to work directly on your remote site, although this is something that should be handled with extreme care, as you are then working on a live web site. In particular, if you are forced to do that (e.g. if you cannot access the local site and need to make an urgent change), don't forget to copy any changes back to the local site as soon as possible.