Learn about Dreamweaver sites

In Dreamweaver, the term "site" can refer either to a website or to a local storage location for the documents that belong to a website. The latter is what you need to establish before you begin building your website. A Dreamweaver site organizes all of the documents associated with your website and lets you track and maintain links, manage files, share files, and transfer your site files to a web server.

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 Tutorial: Publishing Your Site.

For more information about Dreamweaver sites in general, see "Setting Up a Dreamweaver Site" in Using Dreamweaver.