Creating new HTML documents

You can create new, blank HTML documents in Dreamweaver or base a new document on a template. You can also open an existing HTML document, regardless of how it was created.

Usually, you create HTML documents for a specific web site. To learn how to create or edit a site, see Creating a local site.

To open existing HTML files:

Choose File > Open.

To create a blank HTML document:

	Choose File > New.
	If you open the HTML inspector (choose Window > HTML), you'll see that it's not really a blank document—it contains HTML, HEAD, and BODY tags to get you started. As you type in the Document window or insert objects such as tables and images, you can leave the HTML inspector open and watch as the HTML source code is created.

Note: When you save a new file, do not use high ASCII characters (for example, é, ç, ¥) in the file name if you intend to put the file on a remote server. Many servers will encode these characters on upload and cause any links to the file to break.

To create a new document based on a template:

1	Choose File > New From Template.
	A dialog box appears, listing the templates available for the current site.
	When you use a template, some parts of the document are locked so that they can't be changed. This ensures consistency when you use a template for multiple documents in a site.
2	Select a template and click Select.
	To modify the editable parts of the template, select the placeholder content and type to replace it. The noneditable parts of the template are identified by a highlight color. To customize the highlight colors, see Template preferences.

To learn more about designing and working with templates, see Templates overview.