Website Construction, Do You Need To Have Bought A Domain Before Designing A Site?

[nellypope]

I'm a graphic designer (from a print based background) and I'm now moving into web design. I have my copy of Dreamweaver, and a few graphics designed in Photoshop and a paper version of I want my website to look. Today I opened Dreamweaver for the first time, and was completely and utterly daunted. I've looked at a couple of online tutorials, and they keep making mention that you have to have domain space before starting on Dreamweaver? I was under the impression (obviously foolishly) that you would be able to design in DW (saving in a native file) and that DW would enable you to view your work as you went without "going live", then once finished you can upload to a live domain? How on earth do students learn DW without paying for space?

Having a bad day ;-)

[AB Editor]

I am not au-fait with dreamweaver, but I would imagine that there is a way to build it offline for testing.

If you have no html experience, but have some indesign or photoshop experience then this might be a good thing to look at:

http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/muse.html?kw=a&sdid=JJHOU&skwcid=AL!3085!3!19628235770!b!!g!!muse%20download&ef_id=UX6TOgAABJ2u8JP3:20130503130239:s

[ChuckFickens]

You can build and test a site without buying a domain easy enough, for simple site just storing the files in a folder on your hard drive works, also most ISPs give you some free webspace that you can use for testing if you want it on the web.

The other option, is to install a web server on your local PC
http://www.wampserver.com/en/

[ChuckFickens]

A important thing to get to grips with when designing a site without a domain name is relative paths, as long as you only use relative paths and never absolute paths then it's easy to move a website anywhere you want and domain names don't really matter.

http://webdesign.about.com/od/beginningtutorials/a/aa040502a.htm

[nellypope]

Thanks Chuck and Ed, you have given me hope, and answered my question, I have picked myself up off the floor wiped away the tears, invested in some serious help manuals off ebay and had a stern word with myself. :-)

[The Builder]

I've been teaching myself HTML and CSS. I just write the code into "notepad++" then save it to the desktop as an html file. It's easy to pick up the file with Chrome to see how it looks.

[ChuckFickens]

That works fine for simple sites, if you need any server-side scripting it falls down a little though :)

[The Builder]

Good point Chuck ........... I haven't got around to ASP or PHP yet...... :o(