Now that you have Dreamweaver installed onto your computer, the first step to take is to create a place to work locally on your machine.

What does working locally mean?

See important note for Mac users.

Working locally means that you are not working on your live documents directly. For many of you this means that you should not work directly on your I: drive, which is where all of your live web documents reside. Therefore, to work locally, take a copy of the files on your I: drive and place them somewhere local, like on your C: drive. Edit these files as needed, and then overwrite the existing documents on the I: drive.

If you do not have an I: drive, your live files may be located elsewhere. Contact Jesse Days at (509) 963-2810 for more information.

Why not just work directly from my live documents?

If you edit documents directly from your live drive (I: drive), anyone viewing your web page could see changes happen as you made them. They could see misspellings or incomplete information. Another reason we work locally is to ensure that we always have a current copy of our web documents. For example, if you accidentally erased a file from your I: drive, it would be permanently gone. You would have no back up. On the other hand, if you worked on a local drive and then uploaded files to the I: drive as needed, you would always have the most current copy of your web documents on your local machine.

How do I set up a local work environment?

Create a new folder on the hard drive:

1. Open Windows Explorer or double-click on My Computer located on your desktop. What if I work on a Mac?
2. Locate your hard drive or C: drive and double click it.
3. Create a new folder directly on the C: drive by going to the File menu and choosing New Folder. Name this folder Web Files. ^{(see footnote)} The image below displays the window you should see when creating this folder.

Copy live web files to your local environment:

1. Open Windows Explorer or double-click on My Computer located on your desktop.
2. Locate your I: drive. (If you do not see this drive, it is possible that you do not have access to this directory and you will need to contact Jesse Days for permissions. This might also be because your live documents are located elsewhere.)
3. Double click on the I: drive and locate a folder with the name of your department on it. It may just be an abbreviated name. See image below for example.
4. If you double click the department folder, you should see a new folder called public_html.
   Note: Everything in here is live on the web so be careful!
5. Copy everything in the public_html folder and paste it in the Web Files folder you just created on the C: drive.

Congratulations, you have now created a local work environment where you will edit all of your Web pages!

Go to Step 2 >