Ten Ton Dreamweaver [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Getting Ready to Publish

You've seen it all, you've done it all! Now you should have a wonderfully designed site complete with text, hyperlinks, graphics, and CSS. You're finally ready to take all your hard work and post it online for the world to see. But waitdon't jump the gun. Your site needs a few final touchesmaintenance touches, that is.

Before you publish your site, you should do a little housekeeping to ensure that your site's in the best possible condition. In this section, you'll see how to check your entire site for broken links using Dreamweaver's handy Link Checker utility. Then you'll see how to keep your files organized within your local site and how to generate reports on various aspects of your site. When everything's looking rosy, you'll be ready to upload the works and retire!

To keep your site free of broken links, use Dreamweaver's Link Checker.

Checking for Broken Links Sitewide

The first order of business before you upload your site is to ensure that all the hyperlinks in your site work. Broken links on the web are a regular occurrence for most of us, and isn't it frustrating? Not only that, but broken links make your site seem less pro.

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You can also check links within a single page. Choose File > Check Page > Check Links. The Link Checker tab of the Results panel appears, listing any links that are broken in the current page. You can fix your broken links just as you can when you check links with the Link Checker sitewide.

To keep your site free of broken links, use Dreamweaver's Link Checker. With this utility, you won't have to manually search your site for broken linksand it's mindlessly simple to use!

Here's how to check for broken links across your site:

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From the Show menu on the Link Checker tab of the Results panel, you can choose External Links to display a list of external links. Dreamweaver doesn't check external links for you, but you can use the list to check them manually.

Keeping Your Site Organized

When you want to reorganize the files in your local site, you can do so directly in Dreamweaver's Files panel (choose Window > Files). When you work in the Files panel, Dreamweaver monitors and updates links to pages as they move. For instance, if you want to move a file from one folder in your local site to another folder, you just drag it to the new location. When you do, Dreamweaver will display the Update Files dialog box, which asks if you want to update any links to the file. Make sure always to click Update, and you won't have any problems with broken links.

You can reorganize the files in your local site directly in Dreamweaver's Files panel.

If you want to rename a file in your site, just highlight it, click it again (or press F2), and enter the new name for your file. Again, Dreamweaver displays the Update Files dialog box, asking if you want to update hyperlinks to the file. Click Update, and you're good.

If you want to remove a file from your site completely, highlight the file's name in the Files panel and press Delete. Dreamweaver warns you if any pages in your site currently link to the file and asks if you're sure you want to delete the file. Click Yes to confirm. After you delete a file, it's a good idea to run Dreamweaver's Link Checker, discussed earlier in this chapter, to ensure that your site doesn't contain any broken links.

When you delete a file in the Files panel that other pages link to, Dreamweaver warns you of the potential problem.

Running Reports on Your Site

Dreamweaver provides a handy little function called Site Reports, which you can use to collect information about your site. For example, you can use Site Reports to generate a list of documents in your site that were modified within a certain timeframe, or to ensure that all the images in your site have alternative text set for them.

Use Dreamweaver's Site Reports function to collect information about your site.

Reports come in two flavors: workflow reports an88 reports. Workflow reports are useful when you're working with a group of designers on a site. HTML reports come in handy when you want to ensure that your pages are functioning at their best. For example, you can us89 reports to help clean out unnecessary background page code or to ensure that your pages comply with current accessibility standards for those with disabilities.

When you run a report of either type, Dreamweaver displays the results on the Site Reports tab of the Results panel, where you can then make adjustments to your pages.

Here's how to run a report on your site: