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Managing Your Web Sites With WebDesign's Site Manager

WebDesign provides a powerful Site Manager to help you organize your web site and conveniently create, edit and maintain entire web sites locally until they are ready to go online. In which case WebDesign handles all this for you by uploading your entire web site, or the most recently modified documents, to your FTP server.

This tutorial will walk you through the steps of creating a new web site from scratch using WebDesign's Site Manager and explain what each option allows you to do.

TTo start, select 'New Web Site...' from the File menu. The following dialog appears allowing you to create a 'New Web Site', Open an existing one or Import a Folder containing your web site files. When you create or Import a web site folder, WebDesign creates a '.site file in the same folder as your web site files. This is your Web Site file and is what you would select if you were importing a web site. It contains references to your web site folder and other information WebDesign uses to manage your web sites.

By default the 'Add to Web Site List' check box is checked for you. What this does is add your web site to the recently opened Web Sites list. When you click and hold the 'Open Site' button in the Site Manager it will be listed there so you can easily open that Web site without having to go through the process of Open Dialogs searching for it.

The 'Reset Updated Date' check box, which is disabled when creating New Web sites, will reset the last remembered date that WebDesign stores when your site was last uploaded to your FTP server in WebDesign. This option becomes enabled when you import an existing web site file so that you can upload the entire web site, if for example, you are uploading it to a different server.

Your next step to creating a new web site is to press the 'Select' button in order to select the location on your hard drive that you want WebDesign to store your web site files in. Once you have selected the location, WebDesign will prompt you for the name of your web site and create the necessary files for you. WebDesign creates your Web Site folder with an 'images' folder, so you have a central location to place all your image files, and an 'index.html' file which will be your homepage as shown in the screen shot below.

Notice the date in the lower right hand side of the Window. This date shows you the last time your web site has been uploaded to your FTP server through WebDesign. Or, if it hasn't been uploaded yet, it shows the date the web site was created as in the case of the screen shot on the right. Double-clicking any file will open it in WebDesign, or if it is not supported in WebDesign, you will have the option of opening it in any application you select.

WebDesign makes it easy to create new sub folders or new pages. Just click the 'New Folder' or 'New Page' button in the tool bar. A new folder or page is created and allows you to enter the name. You can rename any file or folder by selecting it and pressing the return key.