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桯TML, images, Cascading
Style Sheets, Flash movies, and so on梩hat 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梕ven professional梕mbarrassment.
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 to be
familiar with some basic principles for organizing Web files, as discussed in the next
section.
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