Help with Dreamweaver (Basic)

[markjones05]

I recently purchased a domain name for my website and am now trying to build a site in dreamweaver. I am having what seems to be a rediculously hard time just setting everything up so that I can upload my pages to the site and have not even begun working on the site itself. I dont know what I am supposed to enter into any of these boxes (example) FTP Host, Host directory, etc. Is the access box supposed to be set to FTP or should it be set to something else? Im sure you will need more information yo answer my questions but at this point i'm not even sure what is going on. Any help or a point in the right direction is greatly appreciated. Ive downloaded some tutorials but they seem to just skim over the setting up part and get right into the building of the actual site. Please help.

Dazed and confused,

Mark

 

[mduser63]

Who is your hosting company? Do you even have one? Buying just the domain name is not enough, you need to get someone to host the site for you*. The hosting company will give you the details you need to enter in those boxes. The FTP host is a server name (like a web address). The host directory is the directory on the server that you want/need the website stored in and is dependent on your particular host; for some hosts this will be blank. The other important fields are your username and password, and the passive FTP checkbox. Like I said though, no one other than your hosting company can tell you what goes in these fields. If you don't already have a hosting company there are a ton of choices. Personally I use Dreamhost, but there are many others out there (GoDaddy, Earthlink, Lunar Pages, and thousands more).

Finally, unless there's a good reason for you to use Dreamweaver, you might try starting out with iWeb which is considerably easier to use. You'll almost certainly end up with a much better looking site than if you try to design it yourself in Dreamweaver. Of course you use flexibility/power, and if you have some specific needs not covered by iWeb, then Dreamweaver is the way to go. Just be aware that it has a somewhat steep learning curve.

*You can host a site yourself, but for someone just starting out, I wouldn't recommend it. It's not hard, but it takes some knowledge and a computer that you can leave running and connected to the web 24/7.

 

[markjones05]

Uh yea that would be it i had a domain name but didnt realize i needed a separate host. I feel stupid.

Thanx for the help