NEED HELP--HOW DO WE NETWORK MACS in 2 CITIES?

Question

...for purposes of Web Site Design and accessing files.
We have a small web design company in New York. My staff person is moving to New Jersey and we both want to access our web site files from one hard drive, located here in New York, so she can continue to work for our company while now relocating to New Jersey.
We are using G5's/hardware, and Dreamweaver and Photoshop.
Timbuktu does not work for our purposes. Does anyone know how my staff person in New Jersey can log into our information here directly connecting to our hard drive to make changes and updates to files?
We thought about her just downloading the files, making changes and then reuploading them again to the Internet; however, the problem we encounter is that as soon as the files are uploaded using FETCH, the Dreamweaver/HTML file turns into an I/E (Internet Explorer) file, and the Photoshop file, turns into a Quicktime file. This makes it so that if we download the files from the Internet to make changes that way, we can then no longer double click on them from the Photoshop and Dreamweaver programs, because they are no longer Photoshop and Dreamweaver files.
The only way to access files after they have been uploaded, and then downloaded again, is to do a FILE > OPEN while you are in Dreamweaver or Photoshop, and go down through the levels of files to open the file in that particular program. This takes forever when you are working on 100 or more files per day. It also does not remember the folder you are in, so if you go to open a second file using the FILE > OPEN procedure, it starts back at the top; does not go to the folder you were just in when you opened the previous file. This process is very tedious and cumbersome, and does not work in production environment.
Any suggestions on what work would work well for her to access the files in our office here in New York, while she is in New Jersey? We have tried every Mac Support Rep listed on the Apple Site within 50 miles and no one can come up with anything for us.
Thanks for anyone's suggestions or help!
-Kathy
Poughkeepsie, NY

Answer 1

the most transparent way would be to set up an ipsec vpn allowing secure access to your ny system, in effect you would be giving her direct accesss to your lan
doing this properly requires some work
at your ny site i'd use a router to support inbound vpn connection as well as your general internet access and firewalling (if your existing router cannot do this you'll need a new one)
at the remote end, the mac has built-in vpn support, so as long as a compatible vpn router is used then it is straightforward
an additional benefit of this approach is that you would all be able to use the same vpn to get remote access to your ny network when travelling/at home etc.
a device like this... http://www.netgear.com/Products/VPNandSSL/WiredVPNFirewallRouters/FVS318.aspx
...might be suitable, but if you are not comfortable doing it in-house i strongly recommend discussing requirements in detail with a competent systems integrator, getting things wrong could compromise your security
as a short term solution to the file type changing on upload/download, if you use zip (or stuffit) to create a .zip (or .sit) archive of the files, then upload the archive, when you download and unzip i think the file type will be preserved