MACROMEDIA DREAMWEAVER 8-GETTING STARTED WITH..., Getting Started

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50 Tutorial: Setting Up Your Site and Project Files
A Dreamweaver site consists of as many as three parts, depending on your
computing environment and the type of website you are developing:
Local folder
is your working directory. Dreamweaver refers to this folder as
your local site . The local folder is usually a folder on your hard disk.
Remote folder is where you store your files, depending on your
environment, for testing, production, collaboration, and publication.
Dreamweaver refers to this folder as your
remote site . The remote folder is a
folder on the computer that’s running your web server. The computer
running the web server is often (but not always) the computer that makes
your site publicly available on the web.
Folder for dynamic pages (Testing Server folder) is the folder where
Dreamweaver processes dynamic pages. This folder is often the same folder
as the remote folder. You do not need to worry about this folder unless you
are developing a web application. For more information about the Testing
Server folder, see “Specifying where dynamic pages can be processed” in
Using Dreamweaver .
You can set up a Dreamweaver site by using the Site Definition Wizard,
which guides you through the setup process, or by using the Site
Definition Advanced settings, which let you set up local, remote, and
testing folders individually, as necessary. In this tutorial you’ll use the Site
Definition Advanced settings to set up a local folder for your project files.
Later in this book, you’ll learn how to set up a remote folder so that you
can publish your pages to a web server and make them publicly available.
For more information about how to use the Site Definition Wizard to set
up a Dreamweaver site, see “Setting up a new Dreamweaver site” in
Using
Dreamweaver.
For more information about how to set up a remote site, see Chapter 7,
“Tutorial: Publishing Your Site” .
For more information about Dreamweaver sites in general, see “Setting Up
a Dreamweaver Site” in
Using Dreamweaver .
Set up your project files
When you create a local site, you can place any existing assets (images or
other pieces of content) in the local site’s root folder (the main folder for
the site). Then when you’re ready to add content to your pages, the assets
are there and ready for you to use.