Why is the formatting missing from my html page created from a template?

Question

Hi All!
Hope you can help me.
I've created a new template in dreamweaver - all good. When I preview the template page in a browser everything looks perfect.
But when I create a new html page from that template, even though the page looks perfect in design view, all the formatting is missing when I preview it in a browser.
The site settings were relative to the site root and I've changed that to be relative to the document (not sure if that should make a difference). Either way, it hasn't changed anything.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

The site settings were relative to the site root
If you have not enabled "Preview using temporary files" in your PREFERENCES then site root relative links will fail on preview. Why? Because site root relative links *always* begin with "/", and when the browser sees that, it (since it knows nothing about Dreamweaver sites) correctly looks for the path starting from the root of your hard drive, not the root of the DW site. When you enable preview using temp files, before handing the file to the browser, DW obligingly converts all root relative links to document relative links (which *will* work on preview) but to do that it must create a temporary file (there are other things that happen as well, like external files being embedded in the code for the preview, but that is not relevant to this discussion). The reason a temp file is created is so that these changes don't affect your saved file.
So, if you want to use site root relative links, and do previews of your pages, you must enable the temporary files in preview. There is really no downside to doing this except that you may occasionally see a curious file named xzys139(.html in your local file list - this is a temporary file that was handed to the browser for preview, and for whatever reason was not deleted. In fact, this can save your bacon sometimes because it gives you a 'backup' of that page to which you can revert in the event of something catastrophic.
In the larger picture, there is no benefit to using site root relative links UNLESS you are also using server-side includes. It will make your life a bit simpler if you do not use them.
Finally, having made those links in your template file with the site root relative option enabled, changing that option to document relative will only affect NEW links, not existing ones. This is why Ken asked to see the link in your template - it's because he knows that even though you have made the option change, that old link will not be affected and will therefore fail on preview (assuming you have not enabled the temp file thing).