Dreamweaver MX 2004: The Missing Manual

Chapter 16. 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 Web site will simply languish in obscurity on your hard drive unless you move it to a Web server.

Fortunately, once your Web 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 Web server and your desktop.

Depending on how you operate, choose one of these two methods for transferring your files:

• If you’re the sole Web developer for a site, Dreamweaver’s Get and Put commands are the easiest way to go.

• If, on the other hand, there’s a group of people working on your site, Dreamweaver’s Check Out and Check In tools let you move files at will without wiping out others’ hard work. In addition, this group feature integrates seamlessly with two other industrial-strength Web-collaboration tools: Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe and WebDAV, an open-source file management tool.

Either way, you begin by defining a remote site.

Defining a Remote Site

As you create your Web site on your computer, you keep it in a local site folder (Section 14.1.1.4), often called a local site for short. You can think of a local site as a work-in-progress. As your site is under construction—whether you’re building it from scratch or adding and modifying pages—you’ll routinely have partially finished documents ...