What is a local site?
A local site is a managed collection of Web documents, folders, and resource files on the local file system that you intend to publish as a Web site. A local site gathers local files into a cohesive whole and lets you manage them as a whole, with Namo WebEditor’s Site Manager. A mere bunch of HTML and image files in a folder on your hard disk is not a local site, in the sense in which Namo WebEditor uses the term. A local site must be explicitly created through a command in Namo WebEditor, and its members (files) must be explicitly included.
Benefits of using a local site
Creating a local site makes possible several things that cannot be done with a simple folder full of files. The most important of these are automatic link updating, dynamic navigation bars, and a site library.
Automatic link updating
When you move or rename a file or folder in a local site, any paths or URLs that point to the file (or include the folder) can be automatically updated. For example, if several documents in a local site all link to an image whose path is “images/logo.gif”, and you move the image to an images/logos folder, Namo WebEditor will offer to change all of the affected image paths automatically to “images/logos/logo.gif”.
Dynamic navigation bars
If you’ve surfed the Web even a little, you’ll be familiar with the concept of the navigation bar—a row or column of links that provide shortcuts to key pages on a site or to pages closely related to the current page. Often, the same navigation bar appears on many pages in the same site. Navigation bars are popular because site visitors find them useful, not because they are easy for site authors to create and manage: if you remove or add a page that a navigation bar link points to, or should point to, you may have to update the navigation bars on dozens, if not hundreds, of pages.
You can avoid such headaches by using Namo WebEditor’s dynamic navigation bars, which are made possible when you set up a site tree in a local site. A dynamic navigation bar updates automatically when you add or remove a page at the same level in the site tree as the other pages the bar links to.
Site library
In any medium-size to large site, there will be resources—images, blocks of text, hyperlinks, and so forth—that are used repeatedly throughout the site. When you use a local site in Namo WebEditor, the Site Library panel presents categorized lists of all such resources in use in the site. Inserting an existing resource into a document that is part of the site is as easy as dragging it from the Site Library.
Other advantages of using a local site include one-button publishing and the ability to use a source control system to prevent conflicts when more than one person edits the same set of documents. For all of these reasons, it is always a good idea to create a local site whenever you work on multiple documents that will be published to the same Web site.