Page 2: Dreamweaver
Once you've opened Dreamweaver, you'll be presented with a menu that looks like this:
Let's click the option under Create New that says HTML. You'll now have a default webpage open. Notice that this page is blank.
Before we begin, let's save this file. That way, no power outage, computer crash or other Act of God will harm our progress!
Click the File menu, click Save As. From the drop-down at the top of the page, choose "public_html on ... P:". Let's name your file index.htm
Now that you've done the right things, let's talk about why we did them. The P: Drive is your own personal website. Every faculty/staff/student has one, and can be accessed from the wou website like this:
http://www.wou.edu/~ellism/
You'll need to substitute your username for "ellism". You can put webpages, pictures, movies - really any kind of file here (including Word, Excel, etc...). That's super cool! But remember that these pages are public to the whole universe. Be VERY careful never to post copyrighted content, as you may be violating Federal Copyright Law!
OK, two more explanations: we named the file index.htm -- why? Let's begin from the end... A file with a .htm or .html extension is a webpage. There is no real difference between the two extensions. My suggestion is that you pick one and stick with it. I've used .htm (since it's shorter). Now, for the name of the file. We named it index because a browser automatically looks for files named index when first looking in a web directory. If we had named the file "mypage.htm", and gone to:
http://www.wou.edu/~ellism/
, you would have seen a white page listing out all the files on your P Drive. You could explicitely access the file with:
http://www.wou.edu/~ellism/mypage.htm
But the web standard is to name your primary file index.htm (or .html) so by defaul the browser starts in the right place.
OK, OK enough rambling.... let's make this blank page do something fun!