Web Publishing

Publish Website

Publish your Website using Dreamweaver

Learn how to setup and publish a Dreamweaver website. One of the first things to learn with Dreamweaver is Dreamweaver's core function of web publishing. There are two major steps involved here: 1) Website Setup in Dreamweaver, and 2) Website Publishing or Website Upload.

Prerequisite Knowledge

This tutorial teaches you how publish your website using Dreamweaver and thus assumes you are familiar with some web editing software, even if you are new to Adobe Dreamweaver. However be assured that our detailed instructions can be followed by even a total novice.

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Website Setup

Dreamweaver Website: A Dreamweaver website is setup by setting your local and remote sites in dreamweaver. Here we create a Dreamweaver Site Definition to allow you to manage the files within Dreamweaver.

Define your Dreamweaver Site

Select Site > Manage Sites, the Manage Sites dialog box appears.
click New, and select Site from the pop-up menu. The Site Definition dialog box appears. If the dialog box is showing the Advanced tab, click Basic.
The first screen of the Site Definition Wizard appears, enter a site name to identify your site within Dreamweaver.
The next screen of the wizard appears, asking if you want to work with a server technology. Select the No option to indicate that for now, unless you have dynamic pages and know your technology.
The next screen of the wizard appears, asking how you want to work with your files. Select the option labeled "Edit local copies on my machine, then upload to server when ready (recommended)." Click the folder icon next to the text box and locate your site root folder locally.
The next screen of the wizard appears, asking how you connect to your remote server. Select FTP/SFTP for a remote server or Local/Network for an intranet site.
If you selected FTP, enter the following options:
- Enter the hostname of the server (such as ftp.smartwebby.com).
- In the text box that asks what folder contains your files, enter the path on the server from the FTP root folder to the remote site's root folder. If you're not sure, consult your system administrator. In many cases, this text box should be left blank.
- Enter your user name and password in the appropriate text boxes.
- If your server supports SFTP, select the Use Secure FTP (SFTP) option.
- Click Test Connection.
- If the connection is unsuccessful, consult your system administrator.
If you selected Local/Network, click the folder icon next to the text box and browse to the remote site's root folder. You may want to deselect the Refresh Remote File List Automatically option for improved speed.
Click Next. Don't enable file check-in and check-out for the site. Click Next.
Click Done to finish setting up your local and remote sites.

Upload Website

To make your pages publicly accessible, you must upload your web pages to your website hosting server. After setting up your local and remote sites, you can upload your files from your local folder to the web server.

Upload your files to the remote site server using Dreamweaver:

In the Files panel (Window > Files) select the site's local root folder.
Click the blue Put Files arrow icon in the Files panel toolbar.
Dreamweaver copies all the files to the remote site folder you defined. This operation may take some time, as Dreamweaver must upload all the files in the site.
Open your website url in a browser to make sure everything is uploaded correctly.

That's it, you have successfully published your website!

Software Required

Adobe Dreamweaver: Since this tutorial covers a core function of Dreamweaver, namely web publishing, any version of Dreamweaver should be fine.

Compatible Versions of Dreamweaver for this Tutorial

Dreamweaver 4-8 | Dreamweaver CS3 | Dreamweaver CS4/CS5/CS6
Note: The instructions in this tutorial are same across all Dreamweaver versions listed above; Screenshot images (if any) may differ. Recommended Version: Dreamweaver CS6