Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

Chapter 16. Introducing Site Management

As the dull-sounding name site management implies, organizing and tracking your website’s files is one of the least glamorous, most time-consuming, error-prone aspects of being a web designer. On the Web, your site may look beautiful, run smoothly, and appear as a gloriously unified whole, but behind the scenes, it’s nothing more than a collection of various files—HTML pages, images, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript code, Flash movies, and so on—that must all work together. The more files you have to keep track of, the more apt you are to misplace one. A single broken link or missing graphic can interfere with the operation of your entire site, causing personal—even professional—embarrassment.

Fortunately, computers excel at tedious organizational tasks. Dreamweaver’s site management features take care of the complexities of dealing with a website’s many files, freeing you to concentrate on the creative aspects of the site. In fact, even if you’re a hand-coding HTML junkie and you turn your nose up at all visual web page editors, you may find Dreamweaver worth its weight in gold just for the features described in this and the next two chapters.

Where the first three parts of this book describe how to create, lay out, and embellish your site, this part offers a bird’s-eye view of the production process as you see your site through to completion and, ultimately, upload it to the Internet.

To get the most out of Dreamweaver’s site management features, ...