Welcome to Part 2 of the Building a website with Web Premium CS4 tutorial series. As a web site developer, your primary development tool is Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. You'll use Dreamweaver to accomplish the following tasks:

• Managing the pages, images, and other files of your website
• Generating HTML and JavaScript code for various website design and interaction elements
• Interacting with Adobe services, such as BrowserLab and InContext Editing

In this tutorial, you complete the following tasks:

• Install the local server software
• Set up your site and point to a folder on your hard drive that contains local copies of the site assets.
• Set up a local application server and configure it to prepare for the task of developing the dynamic website's files.

In order to properly create and test your files locally, you'll need to install the same software you'll eventually run on your production server. This software includes:

• Apache (the web server)
• PHP (the application server)
• MySQL (the database)

You can install a free software bundle that includes everything you need for either Windows or Mac. In both cases, the steps to download and install the software are very simple. After downloading the software and files (as needed) in the requirements section below, jump to one of the next two sections and follow the instructions provided for the operating system that matches your workstation.

Requirements

In order to make the most of this article, you'll need the following software and files:

Dreamweaver CS4

• Try
• Buy

(Windows) WampServer

• Download

(Mac OS X) MAMP

• Download

Prerequisite knowledge

Basic familiarity working with Dreamweaver is recommended. Some prior experience uploading files with an FTP client is also helpful.

Building a website with Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium

For your reference, here are all the parts in this series:

Introduction
Part 1: Planning the website
Part 2: Creating a local site
Part 3: Creating a remote site
Part 4: Creating a visual design
Part 5: Slicing and exporting site assets with Fireworks
Part 6: Adding styles to finalize the page design
Part 7: Finalizing and reviewing the home page
Part 8: Creating a database
Part 9: Presenting dynamic data
Part 10: Adding Ajax functionality with Spry
Part 11: Creating an interactive web form
Part 12: Creating and presenting a Flash animation
Part 13: Adding video to the website
Part 14: Creating a blog with InContext Editing

Page 1 of 5

Next Page

About the author