Using Dreamweaver

[Tony Zbaraschuk]

>I have Dreamweaver on order.  I did test it on my own personal website
>before.  Does anyone have any recommendations for converting a large site to
>take advantage of Dreamweaver's template functions?  I want to create a
>common header(?)  and footer(?) for all our webpages. Any other thoughts on
>such a project?

I did a similar project with our library website (http://www.lasierra.edu/library )
and didn't have many difficulties.  Templates have saved me a lot of time in
correcting and updating pages (as did the switch to CSS-style formatting
instead of FONT tags).

Consider using library items for things like headers, footers, and "This page
mantained by, please report errors to <address>".  This makes it easier to
update when things change.

I did run into an occasional difficulty with Dreamweaver creating files on
the remote system and not removing them, but a simple cron job setup 
removed them on a regular basis.  (This was with an earlier version of
Dreamweaver and they may have fixed the bug.)

The last thing I would say is: think about the layout of your site and what
you want to do before you start randomly creating templates.  This might
also be an opportunity to think about revising it.  Generally, once you get
the templates right, it's pretty easy to just cut-and-paste the former
material into it (though if it was created with an earlier page editor you
may want to make Dreamweaver auto-fix the HTML -- that saved me a lot of
grief hand-checking stuff.)  But if you don't get the templates right at
the start, and use one template for what really should be two different
sets of files, it becomes a real problem to fix later on.


Tony Zbaraschuk