[Fwd: Re: Web site design]

[D. D. Brierton]

[Replying off-list]

On Tue, 2004-08-03 at 09:41, Mike Chambers wrote:
> I know this isn't about development of the next release, but this would
> be a question about the packages in the next release.  According to my
> reply about creating/updating a web site below, can I do the html
> converting that is talked about below with packages in Fedora?

Converting from what?

> I don't
> have dreamweaver and not sure I would want to purchase it for windows if
> it's expensive.  Would rather do it with something cheap, unless I can
> use something in Fedora to manage the site with.

Mozilla composer is a reasonably good WYSIWYG HTML editor. Otherwise
there are numerous options for editing the HTML directly. Bluefish and
Quanta are the most obvious options. Quanta comes with Fedora Core,
Bluefish is in one of the extra repositories.

> Any hints/suggestions on this? (ftp access is obviously no problem).

Depending on what version of Dreamweaver your web developer used, your
site may well consist of "tag soup", and editing it in anything other
than Dreamweaver may be a complete pain in the butt. This was mostly
true of older version of Dreamweaver. The newer ones are much better in
this regard. If your web designer/developer had cleanly separated the
content from the presentation by using clean structural/semantic markup
and putting all of the layout and presentation in CSS (which is what
developers *should* be doing nowadays, although if he uses Dreamweaver
it is unlikely that that is what he's done) then editing your pages in a
good text editor would be very easy. As Dreamweaver tends to mix the
content and the presentation together editing the source by hand may
prove difficult. Depending on how important the site is to you you may
wish to consider getting a better developer (i.e. someone who knows how
to hand code and doesn't rely on tools like Dreamweaver) and investing
in some kind of simple content management solution.

Best, Darren

-- 
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D. D. Brierton            darren at dzr-web.com          www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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