Linking and Navigation > Linking and navigation overview

Linking and navigation overview

Once you've set up a local site in which to store your Web site documents and have created HTML pages, you'll want to create connections from your documents to other documents or file types. (For information on setting up a local site, see Using Dreamweaver to set up a new site.)

Macromedia Dreamweaver provides several ways to create hypertext links to documents, images, multimedia files, or downloadable software. You can establish links to any text or image anywhere within a document, including text or images located in a heading, list, table, layer, or frame. For details on creating links, see Creating links.

For a visual representation of how your files are linked together, use the site map. In the site map you can add new documents to your site, create and remove document links, and check links to dependent files. See Using the site map.

There are several different ways of creating and managing links. Some Web designers prefer creating links to nonexistent pages or files as they work, while others prefer creating all the files and pages first, then adding the links. Another way to manage links is to create "placeholder" pages which stand in for the final file and let you add links quickly and check them before you have actually completed all the pages. See Checking links in a page or site.