Dreamweaver CS5.5: The Missing Manual

Chapter 19. Moving Your Site to the Internet

Building web pages on your computer is a big accomplishment, but it’s not the whole job. Your beautifully designed and informative site will languish in obscurity unless you move it from your hard drive to a web server.

Fortunately, once your site is ready for prime time, you can put it on a server without ever leaving the comfort of Dreamweaver. The program includes simple commands for transferring files back and forth between the server and your desktop. All you need to do is provide Dreamweaver with the information required to connect to your server.

Adding a Remote Server

As you work on your website on your computer, you keep it in a local root folder (see Editing or Removing Sites), often called a local site for short. You can think of a local site as a work-in-progress. As you shape your website—whether you build it from scratch or add and modify existing pages—you’ll routinely have partially finished documents sitting on your computer.

Then, after you perfect and test your pages using the techniques described in Chapter 18, you’re ready to transfer them to a server that’s connected to the Internet. Dreamweaver calls the web server copy of your files the remote server, and gives you several ways to transfer files to it from your local site:

• FTP. By far, the most common method is FTP, or File Transfer Protocol. Just as HTTP is the process by which web pages are transferred from servers to web browsers, so FTP is the traditional way to ...