Dreamweaver MX 2004: The Missing Manual

Chapter 14. Introducing Site Management

As the dull-sounding name site management implies, organizing and tracking your Web site’s files is one of the least glamorous, most time-consuming and error-prone aspects of being a Web designer. On the Web, your site may look beautiful, run smoothly, and appear to be a gloriously unified whole, but behind the scenes it’s nothing more than a collection of varied files—HTML, images, Cascading Style Sheets, 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 Web site’s many files, freeing you to concentrate on the creative aspects of design. 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 chapter and the next two.

Where the first three parts of this book describe how to create, lay out, and embellish a Web site, this part offers a bird’s-eye view of the Web 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, you need ...