I'm a newbie, please be gentle with me...

Question

My wife and I have been designing websites for almost 10
years. As fate would have it, we learned on Frontpage, and have
always used it as the 'base' foundation to build sites with. We
currently host/maintain approx. 10 sites, and now realize it may be
of greater benefit to swith to Dreamweaver. A friend gave us a
computer loaded with amazing software, and now we are faced with
the challenge of re-learning. This machine has Dreamweaver CS3
(along with the entire Adobe Design Premium CS3)
Questios: 1. Do I need to 'convert' the sites in order for
them to work properly once I edit them with DW?
2. Will I need to completely re-organize the site, or will
DW take care of that?
If anyone has done this, or can offer advice, it would be
greatly appreciated... and thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Are you *SURE* you are not using shared borders, or FP
navigation elements,
or FP form processing, or FP guestbooks?
If you are, then you can just begin using DW on your site.
Before doing anything else, take a couple of weeks to
gothrough the DW
tutorials, and also to study HTML and CSS. The more you know
about those,
the easier your transition will be. DW expects alot more from
you than FP
did, and as a result, you may find it much more frustrating
to have the raw
reality of web development staring you in the face rather
than the wizards
of FP.
> Is there a way to convert a Frontpage site into a
> Dreamweaver site
1. I'd define a Dreamweaver site that points to a location on
your hard
drive for the local site's root, and to the current FP site
on the web as
the remote site
2. I'd use Dreamweaver (if your host supports FTP
connections) to download
the remote site to the root of the site you just defined on
the hard drive.
This will pick up all the pages *after* webbot action so that
shared borders
and all are already present in the page HTML. This will also
pick up all of
the server scripting. Note - in the event that you are not
able to connect
using FTP since some FP hosts block that protocol, you will
have to use a
third party 'site copier' like Black Widow, QuadSucker, or
WebCopier, (or
even the DW extension called SiteAssist from WebAssist) to
connect and
download using http protocols. Doing it this way will *not*
retrieve any of
your server-script code, if any (unless you have used the
WebAssist
extension).
3. I'd create a DW template for the pages, that captures the
"shared
border"
effect you had in FP.
4. I'd copy and paste content from each FP pages to a new
template child
page and then save the new child page with an easily
identifiable
nomenclature that is distinct from what was used on the FP
site (since you
are saving the new child pages into the same local site as
the FP pages).
5. When the basic site is completed, I'd upload the new DW
pages to some
staging area/webspace, and by using the browser, I'd verify
that the site
(as it now exists remotely) is complete.
6. Then I'd create a *new* DW site in a new location on the
hard drive, and
connect to and download all the files from the staging site.
7. You can now delete the original FP site from your local
system if you
want.
You now have a complete site (minus any of the FP extension
server-side
code) that has no FP footprint.
If you have used any FP server extension functions on the
original FP site
(form processing, guestbooks, tables of contents, etc.), you
will have to
recreate those functions in DW using 3rd party scripts, or
scripts that you
write yourself.
Murray --- ICQ 71997575
Adobe Community Expert
(If you *MUST* email me, don't LAUGH when you do so!)
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"masterstar" <[email protected]> wrote in
message
news:[email protected]...
>I think the only reason the FP extensions have been
necessary is so we can
> upload files to the site (rather than using FTP) which
is becoming a
> problem.
> So, I had this curious thought: Is it possible to work
on an active site
> with
> both FP and DW?
>