FreeBee - 11:13 am on Mar 24, 2001 (gmt 0)

Robert - coming back to your original problem - it's totally feasible to clean up an inherited FP site so that it's reasonably well optimized (very cautious with the "reasonably").

The actual solution depends a lot on the size of the site, the extent to which other FP elements have been included and of course the quality of the initial html (Laisha's font tag example is IMHO a result of poor design/authoring in the first place - it 's not necessarily a characteristic of the software).

Laisha's point to clean the site within the FP environment is absolutely valid - to edit externally simply adds complication to an inherently over-complicated environment.  Tedster's comment re <uneducated use of FP> is true and leads to "When using FP .... KeepItSimpleStoopid"

Assuming that you don't go the complete rebuild route using other software, <to create optimized titles that don't get inserted into the nav bars>, try this within FP (assuming 2000 version):

1) I'm convinced that the text within the FP nav bars isn't even indexed by SE's (the FP search component does but that's irrelevant from an SEO point of view).  So, if that's true, get rid of the nav structure!  Do it as follows: go  "Format-->Shared borders" and simply don't include the nav buttons.

2) To replace the nav structure you just wiped out, create very simple tables for top, bottom, left/right navigation zones with simple text links .  If the site is big and logically structured then an easy option is to create sets of standard FP "include components" to cut down on some of the labour.  (These includes are indexed, perhaps not by all.)

To clean up some of the other extraneous code on your inherited site, it might be worth taking a look at "Tools-->Page Options-->html source-->Reformat using-->Base on current page" and experiment based on a page with "simplified" code.