Please help! Someone developed/built a website for me based on my layout specifications. He did a great job with the customization, however, I am unable to update the site and make changes myself. I have to wait several weeks to get changes done to the site. The designer is a good buy, but he works full time and has a life. What method/step can be implemented so I can go into the template he created and make changes myself? This is slowing me down big time. Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thank you! PS - I'm learning HTML/CSS through online tutorials, but it's going to take time and I don't want to leave my site just sitting there until I fully know what I'm doing.
The site is already up. It just needs to be updated with changes I sent the designer. I want to learn website development for myself, so I'm okay taking the time to learn it properly. My concern now is being able to edit my site when I want to. Thanks.
try learning more of it then. or you can change the whole site that has a CMS like wordpress or joomla where you need not to know html or programming.
Install a wordpress on your site. It will relieve you of the burden of maintaining codes & tags in an html. Instead, you can concentrate on the "look and feel" of every piece of content that you upload to your site. You can get any well-formed html coded to a wordpress theme and then use any of the blog clients to update your blog http://codex.wordpress.org/Weblog_Client Advantages: Wordpress gives you a perfect platform for managing your data. A theme once coded doesnot need tailoring Ample plugins and widgets to add on to the functionality and interactivity of your website Numerous themes to choose from Above all a very convenient learning curve. This is one way you can get rid of the dependency on a well informed and knowledgable designer.
Hi What kind of changes are you trying to make - is it simply text changes? Or are you thinking structure? If you are thinking about learning Dreamweaver now might be a good time to start and get your hands dirty if it's just text changes. I would suggest making a copy of the site and play around with it yourself - if it's minor text xhanges you'll pick it up pretty quickly - just don't post it live until you've checked it in your browser Also you will need the designer to give you the ftp details of the site so you can grab the files, and upload/download to the site. There's loads that are free - if you're on a mac i recommend CyberDuck.
Yeah, like reapwhatyouso says. It's easy to use Dreamweaver, it's just a tool to manage your website and gives you the ability to download, edit and upload amendments. As a simple workflow this is roughly what you should do: Get the hosting details from your designer, unless you already have them. Set up a new site in dreamweaver using the hosting details. Set up a folder on your local machine. Download all the files from your website from the live server to the local machine via Dreamweaver. Once everything is downloaded, copy of this folder within Dreamweaver and label it something like "original". Keep this safe as a backup of the live site and use it to replace any files just in case you screw up any updates. Edit your files locally in the main site and upload them when ready If you don't know x/html then now is the time to learn. You can edit files in Dreamweaver in "design view" - this will allow you to make simple text changes etc. For anything more you'll need to get your learning head on ;-) The other option, as people say, is to use a CMS such as Wordpress but you'd have to copy all your content and re-paste it into Wordpress, although you'd effectively have to rebuild your site within Wordpress. It might just be worth making do with what you already have until you have the confidence to migrate to some form of CMS, dependent on how big your site is. I hope that's of some use to you PS: I just noticed you're in Norwalk, CT - my girlfriend used to live there and I spent quite a few weeks there some years ago before she moved (between England and NY State)
Hi Lever, Thanks for your feedback. This is good information. Could I accomplish this same objective using CSS & Photoshop instead of Dreamweaver? Since I'm learning design I'd like to stay away from WYSIWYG programs for now. Plus Dreamweaver is quite pricey compared to Photoshop Elements 8 (if I'll be able to use it for this purpose). I have the hosting info, but don't know about FTP therefore I am quite nervous about making any changes from the hosting cPanel. I'm using a PC - if this makes any difference. What I really need to know is if there's a way to transfer the existing site into some sort of program so I can make the text & image changes myself. Yes, I'm in Norwalk, CT - Home of the Oyster Festival and Stew Leonard's I have tons of family in Manchester/ Birmingham England. I visited my grandfather in Birmingham years ago and loved every second! **** Correction to my OP*********** I meant to say the designer is a good "guy" not "buy". My apologies.
OK, if you've got your hosting info then you could probably do with grabbing Filezilla FTP http://filezilla-project.org/ The basic concept is that you really want to create a local mirror of your live site. (That's what dreamweaver does but with all sorts of other options too.) All FTP is doing is allowing you to swap files between local and remote. As long as you download from the remote site to local then you have a copy of your site to fall back on - you have the content, the structure etc and you can upload the local backup if you ever need to. As for using CSS & Photoshop, that's a great start but you have to serve pages in html so you need to at least have xhtml/xhtml pages - I don't know if Photoshop has the option to export to html/css - If it does, like Fireworks does, then it will probably be very clumsy/clunky and throw up extraneous code - that's what these packages do from my experience. Your best tool is probably notepad or notepad++ to write/learn your basic code. You'll then need to learn your css and make layouts using css & photoshop but use html to lay these out. Alternatively you could use Nvu as a free open source alternative to Dreamweaver - http://net2.com/nvu/ Being a DW fan of 9/10 years I can't say I've used Nvu much, but it's there if you want to try/use it. As the other posters say you could always try Wordpress. That is, after you've backed up your live site to local, installed Wordpress on the live server with the template of your choice and then reinstalled all your content. So those are a few choices open to you, sorry if that's a lot to take in Ha, Stew Leonards - I always remember the huge hoppers of coffee and the animatronic animals in there - cows & chickens and such As for the Oyster Fest I didn't do that but I do remember there being a bar with a huge carved snake in it and a great Thai restaurant. Yeah, Brum and Manchester are a world apart from the south of England here but good places