Understanding How Web Design Works

In a nutshell, building a Web site involves creating individual pages and linking them to other pages. You need to have a home page, the first page visitors see when they arrive at your Web address, (also known as your URL), and that page needs to bring them into the rest of the pages of the site, usually with links to each of the main sections of the site. Those pages, in turn,link to subsections that can then lead to deeper subsections.After you create a Web site, you can test all the links on your own hard drive and then upload the pages to a Web server when everything is ready and working well. You can read more about setting up a site and using Dreamweaver to create pages on your local computer in Chapter 2. In Chapter 4, you discover how to upload your pages to a Web server when you’re ready to publish your site on the Internet. The most important thing to remember is that you need to create a folder on your local computer that will mirror your Web site on your Web server when you publish your site. That’s why the site-setup process in Chapter 2 is so important — because it sets up Dreamweaver to help you create these two versions of your site: the version you create and edit on your computer and the perfect copy you need to maintain on the Web server.Although you have to save all the files in your site in one main folder, you can create subfolders to organize the site. Thus a big part of planning a Web site is determining how to divide the pages of your site into sections and
how those sections should link to one another. 

Dreamweaver makes creating pages and setting links easy, but how you organize the pages is up to you. If you’re new to this, you may think you don’t need to worry much about how
your Web site will grow and develop. Think again. All good Web sites grow, and the bigger they get, the harder they are to manage. Planning the path of growth for your Web site before you begin can make a tremendous difference later. Neglecting to think about growth is probably one of the most common mistakes among new designers. This becomes even more serious when more than one person is working on the same site. Without a clearly established site organization and some common conventions for tasks such as naming files,confusion reigns.