1. Make sure you uploaded your site to the right place. On many web servers, if you use the FTP info they send, you enter the main folder on the server where they keep your email, web folder, etc, but you need to then open the web folder and upload your files into that folder. It’s often called something like htdocs, or webdocs, or it could be named the URL of your site. It depends on your server, but the key thing to know is that you need to upload the files for your new site into that folder for them to become visible at your URL.

On a related note, a good way to make sure you’re in the right folder is to look for the pages of your old site, make sure you find the main page of the site, and then replace it with the main page of the new site and all of your other files.

2. Make sure you named the main page of your site correctly. On most servers, the main page of your site should be named index.html, but some servers are set up for default.html. It’s often okay to use .html or .htm — they work the same. However, if the main page of your old site is called, say, default.htm and you upload the new version with a main page named index.html, you won’t see the new page if the server is still ‘serving’ the old default.htm page.

Whatever the main page of your old site was called, assume that’s what you should name the main page of the new site and make sure you replace the old page with the new page.

I hope that helps and I wish you all be best with your newly redesigned site.

Janine

I just watched your class on E-Commerce on Kelby Training.  It was an excellent class for someone like me, but  I am experiencing a little difficulty in adding the Google checkout to my site. I have no problems adding the code for the items, but that 2nd piece of code that you said to put at the bottom of every page is causing me problems. I am using iWeb and I am not quite sure where to insert that code, or if it is even possible.

Thank you in advance,

Joe 

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the kinds words about my training videos. I don’t know much about iweb specifically, but some web services — especially those that over simply web design and limit you to templates — make it difficult, or even impossible, to get to the right place in the code to use Google Checkout.

If that’s your situation, you may need to use PayPal instead. Unlike Google, which gives you a small piece of code for each button, and another small piece of code to put at the bottom of each page, when you use the shopping cart service from PayPal, you get all of that code in one big chunk. I still prefer the interface of Google Checkout, but in your case, PayPal may be your best (or only) choice.

I know many people prefer to learn with training videos, but I also have a written tutorial on how to use Google Checkout that may help you find the place you’re having trouble.

I hope that helps you find the right solution for your website and I wish you all the best with your online sales,

Janine
DigitalFamily.com

If you want to create a photo gallery in Dreamweaver today, here are a few options…

You can still create galleries using Flash and then insert them into Dreamweaver, but you need have Flash, and know how to use it, to do that yourself. (You’ll find an article about how to use Dreamweaver to  insert a flash file once you’ve created a gallery in Flash here.)

You can download gallery tools from Adobe. Many people use the extensions to Dreamweaver from the Adobe Exchange site. You can add gallery extensions to enhance the features in Dreamweaver and create a variety of different kinds of galleries.

This link will take you to the search results for Dreamweaver gallery extensions.

You can, of course, create custom galleries in Dreamweaver yourself with the page creation tools, and you can create templates, to make adding and updating pages more automated in Dreamweaver. In that case, you have to decide if the gallery want to create will have two pages or twenty or more, and how much control you want over the design. (You can get started learning Dreamweaver in the Dreamweaver Training Center.)

As a general rule, the more automated the system, the more the design needs to be consistent from page to page. If you learn how to use Dreamweaver to create, link, and optimize pages, you can use the template features in Dreamweaver to creating custom designs more effiiently, but that does require some experience with Dreamweaver.

If you want to see an example of a custom photo gallery created with Dreamweaver templates (using the .dwt file type), you can check out a site I created for Photographer Jasper Johal. That site is featured in my book, Web Sites DIY For Dummies, and you can download the templates that come with the book to create the same design yourself if you like that site. (Warning: this link goes to Jasper’s live site, which does include some nude art photos. http://jasperphoto.com/ I used a simplified version in my book.

Here’s another custom gallery site created with Dreamweaver’s template features for an artist to showcase her work: http://www.inplainsightart.com/. I’m planning to use that site in a new book and video soon.

Another approach to creating photo galleries is to use an online photo hosting service. Because photographers are such a big market, there are several sites that specialize in photo galleries and even selling prints with templates and plugins and everything you need for a monthly fee. Among those options, I believe http://www.zenfolio.com/ is especially popular for professionals and, of course, you can use www.flickr.com for free.

I hope that helps you find the best solution for your gallery,

Janine

Here’s an example of what it looks like:
<img src=”photo.jpg” width=”250″ height=”360″ alt=”My Great Photo” title=”My Great Photo” />
Note that the code: alt=”My Great Photo” is alternative text, which is recommended because this text is used by screen readers for the blind that ‘read’ web pages to people.
Adding the code: title=”My Great Photo” is not redundant, but you don’t have to use the same text for both. The title text will appear when you roll a cursor of the image.

Hope that helps,
Janine

I recently redesigned a site for a client with WordPress and hosted it on GoDaddy. Unlike a standard blog where we would be starting off from scratch, there was already an existing site, hosted on another service, with a lot of content so we used GoDaddy’s Preview DNS feature to give us time to put in the necessary content before switching over to the new site.

This feature allows you to preview your site on a separate URL with previewdns.com appended to the normal domain name.

Several days after launching the new site, many of the pages suddenly appeared with broken image link indicators. It turns out that the previewdns.com domain will get assigned to any images you upload in the WordPress database so, when the Preview DNS expires, WordPress will be looking for the images in a domain that no longer exists.

GoDaddy’s technical support, while usually very good, was not able to provide us with an easy solution to this problem. Their recommendation was to re-upload the images to the site under the new, real domain name – but at that point that would have amounted to uploading a few hundred images again and, through the WordPress system, would have cost us a lot of time and effort.

After doing some research it turns out that there are a couple of fairly quickways to correct this problem, but they require performing the equivalent of afind-and-replace command on the MySQL database that WordPress uses. These processes can be risky so you may want to backup your WordPress database before performing these procedures (http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups)

The first method, which I consider the easiest and preferable way, is to download and install a WordPress plug-in called “Search and Replace,” which you can find at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-and-replace/. This should allow you to search for and replace all the instances of http://www.[yoursitedomain].com.previewdns.com with http://www.[yoursitedomain].com.

If the plug-in method doesn’t succeed in eliminating the extra “previewdns.com” from the URLs, the next method involves operating on the MySQL database at a lower level. The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that WordPress is that the domain name is updated in the WordPress’ options. Two good sources for instructions on that are GoDaddy’s help system (http://help.godaddy.com/article/5712?) and Sallie Goetsch’s blog (http://www.wordpressasylum.com/previewdns-can-bork-your-wordpress-installbut-theres-a-fix/)

The second thing you’ll need to do is replace all the instances of the
previewdns.com URL in the database with the new, normal URL for your site(replacing http://www.yoursitedomain.com.previewdns.com with http://www.yoursitedomain.com) Full, detailed instructions on how to do that can be found at Lorelle Van Fossen’s blog at http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2005/12/01/search-and-replace-in-wordpress-mysql-database/

That took care of the problem for me – saving hours of rework – and it should for you, too!

– Guest post by Dale Ellis dale@ellismultimedia.com

Think of a hosting company like an apartment you rent, a place where your web site can live.

Think of the domain name like your phone number, one that you can transfer (or forward) to a new apartment if you ever needed to do so.

Some web hosting services, such as Weebly, provide a very limited hosting service that only lets you use their templates in their system. You could think of that like getting a furnished apartment you’d rent by the week.

A custom web site created with a program like Dreamweaver or WordPress, is far too complex for a web hosting system that restricts you to the templates on their site.

Web hosting varies the way apartments do. When you sign up for web hosting at a new company like Dreamhost.com, you get a cheap apartment, but one it’s still one that you can furnish yourself. When you sign up with a company like Rackspace.com, you got a much nicer apartment, but you pay for the view (or in this case, the faster, more reliable service). These and many other web hosting services let you upload your own web site to their web server or install a wordpress blog, much like you would furnish your own apartment and hang art on the walls.

You can use the same company to register your domain name and host your web site, or you can use two different companies. If you use two different companies, then you then have to essentially transfer your domain from your domain registrar to your web host, much like you might ask the phone company to move your a phone number to your new apartment. In the case of a domain, however,  it’s usually called changing DNS. If you ever want to change the company where you registered your domain, that’s kind of like changing phone companies while keeping the same phone number and it’s a bit more complicated than just changing DNS.

For more tips on how (and where) to register a domain name, check out the article: Can Anyone Register a Domain Name?

For more tips on web hosting, check out the article: Choosing the Best Web Hosting Service.

Hope that helps,

Janine

I am reading your new book Dreamweaver For Dummies and saw in your book that you discuss WordPress and CS5. I purchased CS5 to work with WordPress and have yet to successfully get it working with my various WordPress installations. I am not a real developer and would prefer to not create a local test environment but to work with Dreamweaver directly with the installation I have on a hosting account with GoDaddy.

It is close to working, but I get an error message about the connection to the database. The FTP access works properly. I can sync the files. Does this have anything with logging into the SQL database? Can you point me to some troubleshooting tips for the initial connection to WordPress and Dreamweaver? Everything I find, read, or watch makes it look so simple and nonproblematic. . .

Thanks
Dave

Hi Dave,

Thanks for buying my book. Dreamweaver CS5 does provide much better support for WordPress than any previous versions, but you will have to set up a local testing environment if you want WordPress files to work on your local computer the way they work on your server at GoDaddy.

That’s because WordPress generates web pages dynamically by pulling content out of a database and displaying it in a template/theme as it opens the page in a Web browser. Thus, you have to set up a database and web server on your computer if you want those pages to display on your computer. That’s not as hard as it may seem at first, but it is more complicated than simply installing Dreamweaver.

The good news for you is that you’re not alone in facing this challenge, so a couple of great services bundle all of the software you need (the Apache web server, MySQL database, PHP, etc.) into one nice package that you can download and install relatively easily on any desktop computer powerful enough to run Dreamweaver. My favorite for Windows is XAMPP www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html. If you use a Mac, a popular option is MAMP www.mamp.info/en/index.html.

Once you install this software and install WordPress (which you can download for free from WordPress.org), you’ll need to start the server and set up a database. You’ll find instructions for how to do this at http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress.

If all goes well, this entire process should take less than an hour, but it’s one of those things that can be a bit tricky to get right the first time. Fortunately, you only have to do it once and from then on, you’ll be all set up to work on your blog on your computer.

An alternative is to work on elements of your blog in Dreamweaver without setting up a local server. For example, you can edit just the CSS files on your local computer by copying them to your hard drive, editing them in Dreamweaver, and then uploading them to the server again. Similarly, you can compose posts in Dreamweaver and then copy and paste them into the editor online. But to get the full functionality of WordPress on your local computer, I’m afraid you’ll have to set up a local testing server.

I hope that helps and I wish you all the best with your WordPress blogs,
Janine

Still want more? Visit the Dreamweaver Help Center at www.DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver to find Dreamweaver tips, tricks, and tutorials.

I have a couple of questions regarding instructions you gave on your recent training video thru Kelby Training.

First, I am on a Mac and would like to know what to name my web URL in the server setup. You indicate Localhost for Windows. Is it the same for Mac?

Second, is the setup the same for setting up a local server (Apache) to test and customize WordPress if WordPress is my blog link on my index page?

Thanks for any clarification you can give.

Kathleen

Hi Kathleen,

Thanks for watching my video. I went over that installation process rather quickly in that CS5 preview video. I plan to do a more comprehensive video on editing WordPress with Dreamweaver later this summer, but here are some answers to help you in the meantime.

1. On a Mac, I recommend you get the MAMP set of programs at http://www.mamp.info. And of course, that you also download and install WordPress.

2. As for the settings and address of your local testing server, follow the instructions from the MAMP site and you should find all you need about how to set up a Mac. Much of it does depend on what software you use and how you set it up on your computer.

3. If you have a site that is built in Dreamweaver and just links to a blog in WordPress from the front page, you can edit the blog just as you would if all you had was a blog, like I showed in that video. To make it all work well together, consider moving all of your Dreamweaver files into the root folder for your local testing server along with the WordPress files. That way you have it all in one place on your hard drive, running on your local server, in the same relative location that it all resides in on the server where you host your site and blog. (If you host your site and blog on different servers, it doesn’t matter if your WordPress files and your main site files are in the same folder on your computer because you’ll need the full URL to link from one to the other anyway).

I hope that helps and I wish you all the best with your site and your blog,
Janine

Still want more? Visit the Dreamweaver Help Center at www.DigitalFamily.com/dreamweaver to find Dreamweaver tips, tricks, and tutorials.

I’m writing in part to tell you how much I’m enjoying your book, although I’m still very new to the concepts, the Dreamweaver program, and web-design in general.

I’m also asking if you might have any recommendations on sources for Dreamweaver templates. I’ve downloaded a some from various Web sites, and I’ve found that they are often not developed with the neophyte user in mind. Trying to modify them involves a fair amount of trying to figure out what the original designer/developer was doing.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Brian

Hi Brian,

One of the most confusing things about templates is that there are so many different kinds. For example, if you download a template designed for Flash, it won’t work in Dreamweaver. Similarly, many templates that are designed for blogs use PHP and require advanced programming knowledge and a web server.

Even if you do get a template designed using Dreamweaver’s template features, it can be difficult to know what and how to change things such as colors and fonts if you want to alter the template design.

Most good pages are designed with CSS these days, and if you learn CSS, you can probably edit most of the well-designed templates you can find on the web.

If you’re still new to design, you may appreciate a book I wrote called Web Sites  For Dummies — it’s part of the new Do It Yourself series it combines templates I created in Dreamweaver complete with instructions for how you can edit them in Dreamweaver.

When you buy the book, you get access to a special part of my Web site where you can download the templates.

You can find the book in the The Digital Family Bookstore.

I hope that helps and I wish you all the best,
Janine