Dreamweaver MX 2004: Your Connection to the Internet

As with the ftproot directory in the FTP site setup, your server has a wwwroot folder that can serve as a default Web site. Any sites that you publish to this directory are available by browsing to http://machine_name/ or this server’s default IP address if you’re browsing from a local area network (LAN), or to http://localhost/ or http://127.0.0.1/ if the browser is actually on the server machine. Once you upload your pages using the FTP site defined earlier, you can view them using this default Web site.

As with the FTP site, you are going to want to change a few things in the default setup. Right-click the default Web site in the Internet Information Services section of the Computer Manager and select Properties. The window shown in Figure 1-9 will be displayed.

Figure 1-9  The Default Web Site Properties window

Just as with the FTP site properties, you can change the description and IP address if you like, but this is not necessary. Likewise, you can change the default directory (see Figure 1-10) if you like, but leave the options checked until you learn more about the ramifications of changing these settings.

Figure 1-10  The Home Directory tab of the Default Web
Site Properties window

The information presented on the Documents tab (shown in Figure 1-11) is important to consider.

Figure 1-11  The Documents tab of the Default Web Site
Properties window

The page names listed here are the documents that IIS will consider as valid default pages for your site. Whenever you visit a site by typing just the domain name, such as www.dwteam.com, you are actually leaving off an important part of your request: which page from that site you want to see. IIS makes an assumption in this case based on the information in this tab. Starting from the top, IIS looks for pages that match these names, and when it comes to one, that is the page displayed by default for that directory. If a matching page is not found, and directory browsing has not been enabled, the user will get a permissions error stating he or she is not allowed to see information from the directory.

By default, IIS will look for three pages to exist in your Web site directory: Default.htm, Default.asp, and iisstart.asp. Look at the listing of the default Web site structure that was created when IIS was installed, as shown in Figure 1-12.

Figure 1-12  IIS's default Web site structure

You will notice that only one of these pages is present, iisstart.asp. If you try to connect to your Web site without making any modifications by entering localhost or 127.0.0.1 in a browser, the iisstart.asp page will be fired and you will see the pages shown in Figure 1-13.

Figure 1-13  The default pages displayed by IIS

You can change these default documents to whatever you like. Regardless of what you choose, however, remove the iisstart.asp document from the list. You don’t want the default pages to display when connecting to your site. Some common selections are listed here:

• Home.asp

• Home.htm

• Home.html

• Index.asp

• Index.htm

• Index.html

• Default.asp

• Default.htm

• Default.html

Note that you can add as many of these documents as you would like, but the more that your site has to search through to find the page it is supposed to display, the longer it will take to get around to displaying it.