SITE MANAGEMENT

At the beginning of the Dreamweaver site pages there was a basic introduction to creating a site in Dreamweaver. That’s because Dreamweaver freaks if you try to create a web page that isn’t part of a site. Once you’ve defined a site, with a local root folder and an index page, you can work forever without worrying about a thing.

However, what you need to remember is that as you work, Dreamweaver is “remembering” where all the gifs, jpgs, animations, and Fireworks htm files are located so that the paths it creates are accurate.

If, at some point, you decide to rearrange the contents of your root folder (or disk), Dreamweaver looses track of everything, and you’ll get nasty gray broken image icons everywhere. The only thing to do at that point is re-insert all of it again, in every file where it was used. NOT fun.

IMPORTANT: if you need to move files around, use the Files panel to do it, check your images once you’ve moved something, and correct the paths/links immediately! When you move things in this way, Dreamweaver can update most of your links automatically.

FILES PANEL

Clicking on the site map icon reveals a flow chart of your remote site, with the index.html file at the top of the hierarchy.

The second row represents the files and/or links in your index.html document, as well as any other files that reside at the root level of your site.

Clicking on the + icon to the left of an html file here reveals files and links associated with that file: the world icon represents a link; the dreamweaver icon represents a file within your site; blank page icons apparently represent links to places outside the site, or email links.

Anything in red with a broken chain icon means links to or from that page are missing/broken.

If you do decide you need to rename a file, or move it from one place to another, do it from the site panel, NOT from the desktop window of your site folder or disk.

Doing it from within Dreamweaver allows Dreamweaver to update all the links for you—nice!

Reorganize the documents and images in your site from the files panel like this:

Control click on the site folder—the one at the top of your files list. Select “new folder” from the pop-up menu.

Click on the new folder icon in the list to name it.

Move any files and/or images by clicking and dragging them from the files list into the folder: you can shift click to select a range of documents at once.

Dreamweaver should then ask you if you want to update any links associated with those files. Click “update!

You can also use the files panel to create links from open documents.

Highlight the text or select the image you want to be the link trigger.

In the properties panel, instead of typing in a url or using the folder icon to browse to the file you want the link to open, click and drag the target icon from the properties panel to the file in your files panel.