Create website in Dreamweaver

See also documentation for the Dreamweaver Templates workshop.

Why Dreamweaver?

• Larger tool set:
  • Templates
  • Forms
  • Rollovers & Behaviors
  • Plugins
• Familiar to many website administrators

Can you create a site in Contribute?

Yes. Simple sites can be created and maintained within Contribute without using Dreamweaver at all. People who would like to create and maintain simple websites and who want a user interface more like a word processor might consider using Contribute as their primary or even exclusive web authoring tool.

Create a Dreamweaver site (demo account)

For the group hands-on session, I have you use a ~demo account rather than ask you to connect to and modify an existing site. Please refer to the user ID and password combination handed out at the beginning of class for this stage of the workshop.

1. Open Dreamweaver
2. Create a new site definition to the demo account given
3. You may name the local folder for this anything you like so long as you can find it again and it is not part of another site definition
4. For remote information, use these settings
   1. Choose FTP
   2. FTP host is "www.d.umn.edu"
   3. Host directory is "www"
   4. Login should be the login provided to you
   5. Please leave password blank at this time
5. Accept all other defaults

Get a Template

For the workshop, we will download and use one of the new UMD templates. You could also use a department template or create one of your own instead.

1. At your root (i.e. top-level folder), create a file called "Templates" - note that it MUST be capitalized
2. Access the UMD Templates website (http://www.d.umn.edu/base/templates/)
3. Follow the link: Dreamweaver templates, PhotoShop files, and Stylesheets
4. Right-click (PC) or control-click (Mac) a file name to bring up the contextual message and choose "save link target as" to save the template file. For the workshop, choose the simpliest one: 1col.dwt
5. Save the file in the Templates folder of the demo account's website folder on your computer

Make an Editable Region

You must have at least one editable region in a template for your content managers to use it. The UMD Templates already have at least one editable region in them.

If you create your own template, you will need to insert one or more editable regions.

To create an editable region in a template:

1. Open the template file
2. Position your cursor where you want the new region to reside
3. From the "Insert" menu, choose "Template Objects"
4. From the "Template Objects" submenu, choose "Editable Region"
5. In the resulting dialog box, name the region
6. Click the "OK" button

Create a page from the template

To make it a bit easier for your content experts, we will create the first page (the index page) so that they are not greeted by an uneditable directory listing.

To create a new page from a template:

1. From the "File" menu, choose "New..."
2. In the "New Document" dialog box, click the "Templates" tab
3. In the leftmost column, click on the site name that you are using
4. In the middle column, choose the template you want to use
5. Make sure the checkbox "Update page when Template Changes" is marked
6. Click the OK button

Save this page as "index.htm".

Upload the Site

Upload the whole site to the web, including all dependent files. This puts them on the webserver so that other users can access them to create new files, especially if you want them to create new files based on the template.