Dreamweaver CS5: The Missing Manual

Site Assets

Web pages integrate lots of different elements: PNGs, GIFs, JPEGs, links, colors, JavaScript files, and Flash movies, to name just a few. In a large site with lots of files, it’s a challenge to locate a particular image or remember an exact color.

To simplify the process, Dreamweaver provides the Assets panel. For want of a better generic term, Dreamweaver defines the term asset to mean any element you use on a web page, such as a GIF, a link, or even an individual color.

Frequently Asked Question: Beware “Site-less” Web Design

Why doesn’t Dreamweaver warn me when I delete or move a file?

Dreamweaver’s site management tools are always watching your back—unless you’re not working within a site. Dreamweaver tries to be a flexible tool for all situations. Some developers don’t like the whole notion of sites and prefer to just work on their pages in the old (unmonitored) way of most programs. And in cases where you just want to edit a single page and don’t want to go through the whole business of defining a site, Dreamweaver’s Files panel lets you browse your files, just like Windows Explorer or the Mac Finder does. If you click the Sites menu (where you normally switch between sites) and scroll to the top of the list, you see a list of hard drives and other networked storage devices. For example, you could select your main drive (C: or Macintosh HD, for example). The Files panel then displays all of the files on that drive. Unfortunately, this flexibility can also cause ...