What A Crazy Month!!!

Wow I totally did NOT mean to let over 20 days pass before I made another post!! It has been a CRAZY month! I finished the class I was in and then my computer crashed! (Thank God it decided to crash AFTER I finished my class!) I'm now in my final class for my Associate's Degree and this one is a doozy! I'm taking JavaScript and it is all new to me!

So in the last post we talked about how to get started in DreamWeaver. Hopefully by now you have had plenty of time to play around with DreamWeaver. Once I get a chance to stop and catch my breath, I will fill you guys in on the awesome project I did for Mother's Day!!

Let's Get Started in Dreamweaver

OK so we discussed in my last post about which programs you can/ should use to build your site. Now let's get started building the site! Before you start building your site, you will need to go to a hosting provider, such as GoDaddy or any of the others, and start off by purchasing your domain name (your web address). I used GoDaddy for all of my websites. (Handy Tip: Do a Google search for GoDaddy coupon codes before you make your purchase, sometimes you will find a code to get your domain name(s) at a very cheap price!) I highly suggest trying to get several domains, for instance our main church domain name is rosemarkpentecostalchurch.com, that was the first domain I purchased. Since then, I purchased RosemarkUPC.com, Rosemark.info and a few others. By purchasing multiple domains, and having them all re-direct your visitors to your main site, you will increase your traffic. A lot of people will also purchase a common misspelled version of their site to help direct people to their real site.

Now that you have purchased your domain name(s), you will need to decide which hosting plan you want. GoDaddy offers a wide variety of plans on both Linux and Windows servers (I will be discussing the Windows server as that is the one I know how to use). The plans vary in price range and storage space and most include email addresses. The plan you choose is up to you and should be based on your needs. The good thing is that if you see you need more or less space you can always go in and change your plan to meet your needs.

When you purchase your plan you will need to setup a "ftp" account (it is free with your hosting plan). FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. You will have to setup a user name and a password (write them both down and keep them). Once you have purchased your domain(s) and hosting plan, and you've setup your FTP, you are ready to open up Dreamweaver.

I've got some screen prints to help you get started. Keep in mind, I am using Dreamweaver CS3, there may be some differences depending on which version you are using.

This is the screen you will see when you initially open Dreamweaver (you can ignore the file list on the lower right for the time being, these are the files to my church website). From this screen you can open your existing web files (if you have any) or in this case we are going to start a new site. To do this, we will select "SITE" from the top menu bar and select NEW SITE...

Now that we are starting a new site, a setup wizard will help us along the process. In the first step of the wizard, you will need to name your site, and enter the URL or address for your site. For this example I am naming my site "test" so the URL would be http://www.test.com.

 Now we have to decide whether or not we will be using server technology... I have to be honest... I don't exactly know the differences, I just know that my web designer friends told me to select YES and one of the ASP choices. When I find out the difference I'll update this post and let you know. For now, let's go with the advice of YES and any of the ASP choices (I use the VP Script on both of my websites and it works...)

Now we are going to tell Dreamweaver how we want to edit our websites. I ALWAYS edit locally and send to the remote server later. This allows me to make changes, save the changes on my computer, go back later and make more changes and THEN tell the computer to post the changes on the web. There are times when you may not want your changes to take effect until a certain date, but you don't want to wait around and risk forgetting the information...

Now we have to setup the ftp information so Dreamweaver can log into our site and post our changes when we tell it to. the ftp address is your URL without the http:// portion. Your login information is the information you setup when you purchased the Hosting Plan.

Now that we've got all that done, go ahead and test your connection, BUT, keep in mind that it takes up to 24 hours for the account information and the ftp information to fully update so you may not get a successful test. Once you complete the setup wizard, you should see the screen below:

Notice the file name at the bottom right... Should be whatever you named your site... From here we can start a new HTML or ASP web page.

I will talk about starting the coding for sites in the next post. For now, play around in Dreamweaver and get to know your software.