Taking my sites to the next level

how can i increase productivity

[BlueGhost]

Hello all, i am seeking a way to become more productive with the larger sites that i work with. I work for a company that produces a few websites a month, and we have one big website. The large website was made 8 years ago in front page, and recently i went back and updated the site, creating a new template with dreamweaver and using a little css. I am not the best web designer, but im slowly learning.

We are having a huge problem with maintaing the site. One of the links had 2005 and when i went to change it to 2006 i had major problems. With the site being over 200 pages, i can not upload all the pages because of my connection. Every 5 pages my internet times out, and have to reconnect. Sometimes it even uploads a blank page. So dealing with only 200 pages and uploading is a huge problem when i have to make a small change.

What can i do to get around this? My company doesnt want to use SSI (server side includes) because the owner wants to keep using html files instead of shtml. I think mainly because he doesnt want to change the name of the files, because the pages are so old and are getting hits from search engines.

To Sum it up:
Site is too large, whats the best method for updating every page on the server without having to reupload every single page. Can this be done with dreamweaver, and can i do it without changing the extension from html to anything else. Thanks!

[r3nz0]

It could be the problem in a FTP client program.. please try FileZilla, this one is opensource and i can download/upload more than 500 files in one batch without a problem...

Try to trust your allready posted HTML files and dont change it to SHTML.. just try to build a dynamic site arround it.

Other nice trick i used sometimes is to create a ftp batch file... but FileZilla is cool..

[Marcia]

Site is too large, whats the best method for updating every page on the server without having to reupload every single page.

Simplify and streamline, and once you get the hang of it you'll never turn back. :)

BG, common elements across a site (like copyright info & navigation, etc.) can all be done using SSI (server side includes) or PHP includes (my personal preference). You don't have to change anything but one single include file (maybe one for each common section across pages) to change it across the whole site by simply updating and uploading one single page.

leftnav.php
footer.php

See, you just change one of those to reflect what you want updated, upload it to the server - in an /includes/ folder is how I do it - and the whole entire site calls that amended file and VIOLA! the whole site is updated.

You don't have to change file extensions, they can be kept to .htm by parsing the .htm files for the PHP processing in .htaccess - the only problem being that .htaccess used the *normal* way does not play well with Front Page Extensions being used. It could bring the whole site down with a 500 server side error.

If you've changed to Dreamweaver and there are no longer any FP elements being used, like the proprietary FP includes and webbots, etc., then uninstalling the FP extensions would enable you to begin to use includes and .htaccess - PHP is my choice because it leaves a site open for future implementation of PHP functionality without any conflicts.

This is for Apache servers, which are far more idiot-proof and easy to get help with than IIS.

You may be using Dreamweaver Library items now - if so, you have to upload all the changed pages. Not so with regular includes - they are a time saver and can be a life-saver in cases like yours.