Dreamweaver Tutorials -

Defining a Site to NOT use the built-in FTP function

This tutorial will walk you through the steps to set up a new web site in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX that you can use to create and edit your pages in, but NOT to upload your files using the built-in FTP function. You will upload your files outside of Dreamweaver using the File Manager function provided as part of many free hosting services such as Tripod, Geocities, and others or to use an FTP client such as CoreFTP to upload your files.

This tutorial shows screen shots from Dreamweaver MX. Newer versions of Dreamweaver, such as MX 2004 or Dreamweaver 8 will look a bit different. For a printable copy of this tutorial, download this Word file.

When you use the File Manager inside Geocites, Tripod or Angelfire to upload files, or if you are going to use an FTP client (such as CoreFTP) , you do not need to put in any FTP information, but you still want to create a site to keep all of your files in the same folder and organized. Here is a tutorial on how to use CoreFTP.

Assuming you already have DreamWeaver (DW) open on your computer.

Click on Site>New Site:

Name your site.

Click NEXT.

Check - No, I do not want to use a server technology (you aren't going to be using ASP, .Net, or PHP for this project.

Click NEXT

Now you will select how and where you want to work with your files for your web site.

Select the Edit local copies on my machine, then upload to server when ready radio button.

Locate your website folder you created during the HTML tutorial.

Click NEXT.

In the dropdown menu under How do you connect to your remote server?, select None. This is because you will not be connecting to Tripod using Dreamweaver, but you will use Tripod's File Manager to upload files.

Click NEXT

Check No, do not enable check in and check out (this is an advanced feature).

Click NEXT

Review your information. If anything is incorrect, use the Back button to go back to the appropriate screen to correct it.

Click DONE

Your site will be created and will display on the right side of the screen in the Files panel. If the Files panel is not visible, click on Window and click on Files.

If you have already created some files, or put graphic files into this folder, these should show up under this site folder.

In this screen shot I have more files that I have created in this site. You open a file by double-clicking on it in the Files panel.

IMPORTANT!!

Dreamweaver saves files by default using the htm extension instead of the html extension. You saved your files in the HTML tutorial using the html extension, so when you upload your files to Tripod, you will notice that you have two index files and two bio files. Delete the index.html and bio.html files so that the site will read the right files.

You will also need to make sure that all links on your pages that referred to the files with the html extension are changed to htm. A browser reads .htm differently than .html. So if something doesn't show up after you upload to the Tripod server, double check all files names.

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© 2004- 2005 Eli Collins-Brown