UP TO SPEED: Terms to Know
During the tutorial on these pages – and indeed throughout Dreamweaver – you will come across a few terms commonly heard at web designer lunches:
Reading: How to use dreamweaver cs6 to create a website
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Root Folder. The first rule of managing a website is that every part of the website you are working on – webpage documents (HTML), images, audio files, etc. – must be kept in a single main folder on your hard drive. This is the root folder of your website, and because it’s on your computer, it’s called the local root folder, although Dreamweaver refers to it as your local site folder. The root folder (aka site) is the main parent folder. Think of it as the edge of the known universe for this place; nothing exists outside of the root. Of course, to organize your website’s files, you can add as many subfolders as you like to this main folder.
Once you’ve finished creating a website on your computer, move the files to your local root folder on a web server, for the world to see. They call the folder where you put your site files on the server the remote root folder.
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Local site. The usual routine for creating web pages goes like this: you create the page on your own computer – using a program like Dreamweaver – and then upload it to a computer on the Internet called a web server, where your handiwork is exposed to the general public becomes available . Therefore, it is very common for a website to exist in two places at the same time, one copy on your computer and the other on the server.
The copy on your computer is called the local website or development site. Think of the local website as a kind of stage on which you build, test, and change your website. Because the local site isn’t on a web server, the public can’t see it, and you can freely edit and add to it without affecting the pages your visitors see (they’re on the remote site, after all).
Remote site. When you add or update a file, you move it from your local site to the remote site. The remote or live site is a mirror image of your local site. Because you create the remote site by uploading your local site, the folder on your web server has the same structure as the folder on your local site and contains the same files. Only polished, fully functional pages go online to the remote site; Save the half-finished, typo-ridden drafts for your local website. Chapter 17 explains how to use Dreamweaver’s FTP capabilities to define and work with a remote site.
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