Home » Resources » Dreamweaver CS4 Tutorial » Building a Basic Web Page With Dreamweaver

Please follow all of the steps below exactly – don’t worry if you don’t fully understand the steps you are carrying out at the time – all will become clear as you move through the tutorial. Alternatively we offer a great introduction to Dreamweaver course

What you will need:

Dreamweaver CS4:
You can buy Dreamweaver from a number of re-sellers on the web including Amazon – follow this link to purchase the software

You can also download a free 30 day trial from http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/ that will be suitable for the proposes of this tutorial

A Web Hosting Account:
This is where your website is stored so others can access it on the World Wide Web.  You transfer (upload) your files to the Host’s servers where they can be accessed 24 hours a day by anyone browsing the internet.

A Domain Name:
Although you won’t need it for this tutorial you will need to register a domain name for your site.  This can be anything you like (as long as no-one else has already registered it) like for example www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk or www.mycompanyname.com.  This gives your website a unique identity  that people can use to access your site.

Setting up your site using Site Manager

1: Open Dreamweaver

2: You will now see the Dreamweaver interface (pictured below) with the menu bar along the top (“File Edit View Insert Modify Format Commands Site Window Help”).  This is where you access most of Dreamweaver’s features.

3: First we need to open the Site Manager.  Click ‘Site’ in the Menu Bar, then choose ‘New Site’ from the dropdown menu that appears.

4: A dialog box titled “Site Definition for Unnamed Site” will appear (there may be a number after this title, don’t worry about this as we will soon be changing the name).

There are two tabs at the top of the dialog box, ‘Basic’ and ‘Advanced’.  At this stage you need to use the ‘Basic’ tab, click the ‘Basic’ tab to ensure that it is selected.

The next stage is to enter a name for your site.  You should see a field named ‘What would you like to name your site?’  Choose a name for your site and enter it in this field.  This is a local name for your own reference and will not show up on your site online, it will allow you to distinguish between them if you are creating more than one site.

For this tutorial enter ‘Example Website’ into this field.

The next field is called “What is the HTTP Address (URL) of your site?”  If you have registered a domain name enter it here.  For example, if you had you had registered ‘siliconbeachtraining.co.uk’ enter ‘http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk’ into this field.

Click ‘Next’ at the bottom of the window to continue.

5: Accept the default on the next screen “No, I do not want to use a server technology” and click ‘Next’.

6: On this screen you can choose where Dreamweaver will save your local files.  If you accept the default Dreamweaver will create a folder with the same name as your website.  You can also specify another folder if you like.  For simplicity we will accept the default by clicking ‘Next’.

7: The next window will ask you “How do you connect to your remote server?”.  Choose ‘None’ from the dropdown menu by clicking the down arrow.  We will change this later but for the time being selecting ‘None’ will allow us to move on quickly.

Click ‘Next’ at the bottom of the window to continue.

8: The final screen shows a ‘Site Definition’ summary.  Click ‘Done’ at the bottom of the window to finish.

You have now defined your site in Dreamweaver.

Similar resources you may like

1. A two column Web Page with a Header and Footer
2. Publishing Your First Web Page
3. Testing Your Web Page
4. Adding a logo to your Website
5. Making a text link on your Web Page

Tags

Basic Web Page, define site, dreamweaver cs4, free tutorial, Site Manager, Web Page

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This entry was posted by Colin Welch on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Dreamweaver CS4 Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.