Now that we have created the new site, Dreamweaver has loaded that site into the Files panel over here on the right and I have the Images folder that I created. I created that myself, remember, during the process, but I don't have an index file and I don't have a folder with a basic.css file. Remember, if we go back over to GoLive, as soon as we created this site in GoLive, it created that index page and that css file. But again things are not as different as they might appear. It is nice of GoLive to try and help out and start and start out with that index page, but Dreamweaver was designed not to make too many assumptions about what you might want. So when you create a new site, it creates a blank folder with nothing more than you have inserted into it.

If you want to create a new index page, all you have to do is create a New>Blank> HTML page. For now, I am going to do it with no layout, Create and there is my blank page. It is good practice in Dreamweaver to save a page as soon as you create it. So I am going to go ahead and choose Save. Make sure I have got my main root folder selected and notice here, you can always use the Site Root button to make sure you are in the right place. If you are on a PC that's up at the top of this window and because this is the main page of my site, I am going to call it index.html. No matter which program you are using, it is always important to start with the site definition or site setup process because both GoLive and Dreamweaver need to know where your root folder is in order to manage all of the links, inserted images and other elements in your site properly.

And that's because at the end of this process when you upload your site to a public web server or to your university server or corporate server or wherever you host your site, when you move it from your local computer to that remote web server, you want to make sure that all of the files and folders in your site stay in the same relative location. The best way to do that is to keep them all in one folder and make that the root level of your site. GoLive handles this quite differently and as we study the structure of a website created in Dreamweaver compared to the structure of a site created in GoLive, this is one of the most dramatic differences between these two programs. We will study those complexities more at the beginning of the next lesson.