Publish and manage websites

Hi there.

In this video we're going to publish our website to the Internet.

Right now we've created a site here in Dreamweaver.

Here's my index page, I'm going to double-click it to open it.

Okay, I'm in Developer mode.

You might be in Standard.

Let's have a little look at it while previewing in real-time browser.

It's down on the bottom, right here.

I'm going to preview in browser and then I go to Google Chrome.app.

Here's the site here.

And we're testing what's called "locally".

It just means that this is on my computer, but nobody else in the world can see it.

So we're going to go through now and connect our remote server to our site definition in Dreamweaver.

This may be better explained as connecting to our hosting company.

So let's go and check out what we've got.

So here is the site on my desktop.

It's on this folder here called rendered.

And here is my index page and my CSS and all my images.

But this site now only exists on my computer.

So what I need to do now is to push this onto our remote server.

Now to do this you'll need to sign up for and pay for some type of hosting.

Now there're a lot of different hosting companies to choose from like GoDaddy, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Digitalocean.

There're a lot of them.

Don't worry, the process is often common across them all.

So let's go and connect it up.

So here in Dreamweaver it doesn't matter if you're connecting and creating a new site and ending up in here.

I'm going to hit Cancel - or I'm going to use this existing site I have open here.

And then I go up to Site and Manage Sites.

I'm going to double-click and open this one called Rendered.

Now that's the one I'm working on now.

We end up in the same place.

What we're going to do is: We're going to work on this one called Servers and we're going to click this plus-button and this is what's called a remote server.

A remote server is a server that is set up so that others can see the website that we publish.

Now the Server Name is something for us so we can call it anything.

Let's call this one Rendered.

Now there are a few different ways to connect.

Typically it will be FTP or SFTP.

We'll use SFTP as it's a little more secure method for transferring files.

Now you get this information from your hosting provider.

Normally they'll email it to you.

Or you can get it from when you log in to your hosting account and you can look at the details there.

Now let's look at the information you're going to need.

First stop is the SFTP Address.

Now often this is just the URL for your website with the WWW in front of it.

I'm going to use mysite.com here, just as a placeholder.

You put in your own site details.

Now sometimes though some hosts require you to have this SFTP and then a period before your URL or if you're doing FTP just FTP period your URL.

And sometimes it can be numbers.

It might be an IP-address.

But just use whatever your hosting company is giving to you.

Next stop: Add the user name and the password that you were given.

And now is our moment of glory: You're going to click Test and what you're hoping you're going to see is "The Dreamweaver has connected to your web-server successfully."

We haven't got that because I'm just using mock details.

But if you too have had some problems there're a few easy things you can do to try and fix it up.

But my advice always is: Don't be afraid to call the hosting company.

You're paying for the service and just call them up and explain what you're doing and the details you need and just work through it on the phone.

Often setting up a host with a different host - there can be just tiny little differences that are going to cause this not to work.

Okay, so the first thing to test this is: Play around with FTP in the front or not.

Where it says Root Directory try putting in public_html, hit test, see if that fixes it.

If it doesn't - remove it.

Another thing to check is: Sometimes the Username needs to be the full web address.

Give that a test.

The last thing to check maybe before you give the hosting company a call is just to change the WIFI-network you're connected to.

Say if you're connected to your office network like I am what I might do is maybe connect via my cell phone.

Just to see if it's maybe my modem that's causing the problems.

Very rarely does that happen, but it's a nice, easy one to work out rather than spending ages on the phone with the hosting company.

Could be your modem.

Remember: If those easy ones don't work give your hosting company a quick call and see if they can help you.

And then I'm going to click Save, Save again and Done.

Okay, so we've connected it and we've tested it.

But now we need to upload it to that hosting company and they're going to share it with the world.

So for a first time upload a nice, easy way to do it is in your Files panel.

Yours might be on the left or right, depending on which view you're in.

I'm on Local view here and I can see my site.

What I'm going to do is: I'm going to click on this one that says Synchronize and I have a couple of options now.

I'm going to...

In terms of Synchronize I'm going to Synchronize the entire site.

What that just means is that it's going to push anything that is new from my computer up to the site.

And if there's anything that's been updated on the site, it's going to pull it down to my computer.

There's nothing new on this site because it's brand new.

And that's why the Synchronize feature in Dreamweaver is really cool.

It means that if you're working with somebody else - like I do quite a bit - is that we're both going into that Remote site and adjusting files.

Now if I keep working on my local folders I might overwrite something that I've done.

So what I do whenever I'm starting a project is: I click Synchronize just like we've done here.

What it's going to do is: It's going to pull down any files that are on the server that somebody else has worked on and it's going to download them to my machine so I can start using them.

Great.

Let's click Preview.

It's telling me that everything is going to be put.

And that's typical when you first load a site and nobody has been on the server and made any adjustments.

So put means it's going to put it from my computer up onto the server.

I'm going to click OK - and off it goes.

Now it's uploading all my images and all my videos, so it might take a little while.

So for the power of video I'm going to speed this up.

Go.

Alright, so that can take a little while on the first time.

The cool thing about it though is say you start doing some adjustments and you adjust a bit of text here And you hit Save.

And you do the same thing, you click Synchronize, it'll only update the files that have been updated, so you're not going to have to upload it.

In my case there was lots of images and a nice big video that went along and that's what took a little bit of time.

So now really, there's two copies of this website in the world: There's one that's on my hard drive, and it's on my desktop.

And this is what's called the local view.

Now there's another copy of this website up on your hosting company's server somewhere.

And it's your hosting company that is supplying it to the world.

So we're looking at our Local view.

If you ever need to see what's up on the hosting server to compare, you can click on the Remote server and it's going to show me: Everything is up on the server.

And in this case they're exactly the same.

But as your site grows, you're going to find that you've got some files.

A buddy has helped you adjust the site and they've added files to it, but you don't have it - you can have a little look on the Remote server.

We're going to go back to Local.

It's typical to be working in your Local folder here.

And if down here we decide instead of "About" it's going to be called "About Us" and I hit Save I can click Synchronize again, click the Preview and it's going to check my Local version of my site against the version that's on the server to see if there're any changes.

And it's going to say just the index page is being changed.

And I can say "Yes, please, go and do that one."

There're times though that and some files will try and synchronize every single time.

And it just happens sometimes with time zones and servers and things.

So what you can do is if you're hitting Synchronize and it's uploading the site every time and it's taking forever.

What you can do is something called cloaking.

And you can say: This is a video file, because this is a very big file, it's like 24 megabyte video.

You right-click it, you can go to Cloaking and you can go to Cloak.

And it just means whenever I hit Synchronize now it's not going to check that one.

It's going to leave that guy alone.

If you do make changes to paintwave.mp4 you're going have to uncloak it and synchronize.

Just do that for any files or you can do that for complete folders.

Say you're not updating the images.

It's just a lot of ticks it means you're doing.

But for some reason it's uploading lots of the images.

Cloak the whole folder and it just means that when you synchronize it'll ignore that one for you.

Okay, my friends, we have adjusted our site definition and edited our Remote server, we edited the SFTP details and we got it all working nicely.

Then we synchronized our site to make sure the files were uploaded to the server.

And now the lovely people of the Internet can go to your URL and see your website.

Nice work!

So that is "Publishing from Dreamweaver."