SlowTrav - 5:16 pm on Aug 9, 2006 (gmt 0)

I run a 2,500 page website (9,500 pages counting the pages generated from a database) that I created six years ago in FrontPage (FP). Over the years I use less and less of FP and more CSS, but I still use FP navigation to generate my navigation columns. I am changing that now to use include files instead of the FP navigation because I want to move the site to DreamWeaver (DW) and it does not automatically generate your navigation column.

The FrontPage webbots that do the include files act like server side includes (SSI) even though my files are all .htm .

So my problem is, when I switch to DW, if I want my include files to be SSI, I have to rename all my pages to .asp (we use ASP and already have many .asp files - but most are .htm). But this means that pages that are indexed by Google as .htm will now be .asp and it might affect things with Google.

I run on a windows shared server (CrystalTech) and cannot set the server to parse all .htm files - the files need to be .shtm or .asp.

Does anyone have advice for me? I could use DW templates and library files instead of SSI, but this will be a lot more work during the conversion. The benefit would be that the file names stay the same. Would it be worth the work to do this instead?

If I have SSI on every page (header, footer, breadcrumbs, navigation column), does that slow down the page on the server?

Thanks!
Pauline