Managing and Inserting Assets > Asset management overview

Asset management overview

Assets are elements, such as images or movie files, that you use in building a page or a site.

The Assets panel helps you manage and organize your site's assets more easily than you can in the Site window. The panel displays the assets in your site, dividing into the following categories:

	Images
	Colors
	URLs
	Flash movies
	Shockwave movies
	MPEG and QuickTime movies
	Scripts
	Templates
	Library items

Note: Only files that fit the above categories are shown in the Assets panel. There are other types of files that are sometimes called assets, but they aren't shown in the panel.

If you haven't already gathered assets for your site, you can obtain them from various sources. For example, you might create assets in an application such as Macromedia Fireworks or Macromedia Flash, receive them from a co-worker or client, or copy them from a clip-art CD. For more information about planning and gathering assets, see About site planning and design.

You can use the Assets panel in two different ways: as an easily accessible list of the assets in your site (the Site list), or as a way to organize the assets that you use most frequently (the Favorites list). The Assets panel automatically puts your site's assets in the Site list. The Favorites list starts out empty; you add whatever assets you want to it.

Most of the operations of the Assets panel are the same in the Site list and in the Favorites list. There are a few tasks, however, that you can perform only in the Favorites list (see Using favorite assets).

Templates and library items are covered in more depth in Templates and libraries overview.