Core_Computer _____Introduction to Dreamweaver

The first step to creating a web site is to create and name a folder in which to keep all your documents. As you are working save your HTML documents in this folder. Keep all your images and documents together in this folder. So do it now......create a folder in your Users (not the desktop otherwise when you log off the uni network your work is automatically deleted) and name it. This folder is your root folder. A root folder is the folder that you keep your site in. Every piece of the site is kept in the same folder- by this I mean all HTML files and graphics, sound files, movies, Flash files and so on. They all reside in your root folder on the users server- or if you are working at home on your hard drive.

So the next step is in this folder also create another folder for your images and name it images.

Create a second folder and name it 'images' - this is where you need to put all you web prepared images. Not Photoshop files or Illustrator file but images you have saved in a web format such as a gif or a jpeg. There is more information on this in (image preparation for the web)

Open Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver will open with a blank document.

Save your document as the first page

To save the blank document that was created when you launched Dreamweaver go to

File > Save.

In the “Save As” dialog box, select your site folder and save the file in that. Take care that you are saving to right folder.

In the File Name field, type index.html

Click Save.

Your document name…..and where you keep it....

Every document - that means all images and all web pages needs to have a suffix. When you give the document a name, use lower case with no spaces and since we are using a MAC add ".html". For PC's the suffix is ".htm" In other words PC's only allow 3 letters after the dot. Browsers recognise both suffixes.

For instance say I have just written this document and need to name it. A sensible name would be introduction but I must also include the suffix so it is named introduction.html Notice that there is a dot (period) before .html.

The ".html" part of the name tells the browser that this is a HTML document. Graphics use a different suffix. For Graphics depending upon the format the suffix is either .gif or .jpeg. The ".gif" part of the name tells the browser that this is a file in gif format. In the case of jpeg it is the same. The ".jpeg" suffix tells the browser that this is an file which is in JPEG format. For the moment save all your html documents and images in the same folder.

Your folder contents should look like this-

Now the next step is to define your site...

These notes are written for students who undertake the Core Computer course at School of Art, Australian National University. Students of the course should feel free to contact any member of staff with comments questions and general suggestions..

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This is important!

One of the rules of HTML is that all documents have a name.suffix......

This is important!

For your website to work you need to save all your html documents and images together in the same folder.