Few Questions About Migrating Site & Editing Many Pagesat Once

OK. First things first. My manager doesn't want me listing our company name in
this post since we are currently trying to get out of our hosting contract and
she doesn't want to jeapordize anything in case someone stumbled across the
post by a search or anything. FYI: I have Dreamweaver CS3.

So here's the deal. My company would like to move our site away from this
proprietary WYSIWYG online editor we have. The current setup locks us into to
this silly online editor for our site and doesn't allow access to our files on
their server. This means that if I want to simply change the file name of a
picture on our site, I have to log in to their editor and go through about ten
stupid steps. The problem is, the site is dynamically generated. Every page on
the site looks something like this at the end: default.aspx?pageid=9. Those
links are permanently attached to specific pages and the content on the
individual pages rarely changes. I tried using some offline downloaders to grab
every page of our site in case we move it elsewhere. When these pages are
downloaded, though, the file names change and it breaks all of the links.

If I go into the code and change every individual link to other pages and
style sheets I can get it to look good. So my first question is: is
there a way to easily allow Dreamweaver to import a couple hundred dynamically
generated pages and make them into static pages so that they just look like
"xyz.com/products.html"? Fortunately, our site is not extremely large (maybe
250+ pages) so in an absolute worst case scenario I could post a lot of the
pages by hand.

My second question regards changing specific items across many pages.
Our current site contains the ability to place little widgets into pages. This
means that if we want a navigation bar on a hundred different pages, we just
edit the one entry for the widget and every page changes. I'm sure this is
possible in DW, but I spent an hour trying to search online yesterday trying to
find info and didn't answer my question. Is this what templates are for? I saw
people mentioning Find All, but this didn't seem like a perfect solution. I
apologize if this is a very stupid question. No one needs to take the time to
explain the exact process to me, but if someone could just tell me the name of
the functionality and if they know a specific resource to learn more about it,
that would be wonderful. Whatever this functionality is, would I have to
start over from scratch with the pages? Or could I implement it with the
current site that's already put together? I'd be happy to convert the site
to static HTML if there's an easy way to change multiple pages at once other
than Find All and Replace.

Thank you so, so much for any help. I appreciate it. I just want to make sure
these things are possible before we start the ball rolling down that path.

I think I could answer your questions with just one answer so here it goes.

What you need to do when making this type of mass move from an online editor
to DW would be to first download a copy of everything you have just so you have
a backup in case any mistakes are made.

Next with the downloading of the files. You will need to log in via FTP in
Dreamweaver or via your file manager on the control panel of your website. If
you are unsure of where this is or how to log in via FTP, you may need to
contact your host for the login information. Even though the files appear to
be dynamic I do believe that most editors would just store the pages separately
and just uses includes to make that work. However, if this is not how it
appears, post back with the name of the editor that you were using.

Next, take one of the files you have. Based on the description you are giving
me it sounds as if they all look the same just with different content (nav bar
aside). If this is the case you can create a template file in Dreamweaver.
Within that template you should place the content that is the same for all of
your pages. Then make one editable region for your content to go into. These
links can be found from the main toolbar for creating editable regions and
other template functions (which I believe includes the navbar).

Also one thing to note with templates is that they will automatically fix
links on the pages when you save the template to include new files via links.
So you don't have to worry about updating all of the pages all of the time.
The only thing you would need to update the individual pages for would be for
the content on those pages.

Hopefully this will get you started in the right direction. But as I said in
the beginning if you have trouble getting the files off of the site post a bit
more information about what you have and hopefully someone here will be able to
point you in the right direction.

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately, the hosting company is stonewalling us
and claims that they cannot provide us with the FTP login information. Hence
why I was trying some site downloaders to get the pages straight through http.
But, this messed up the filenames. It changes them from that
"default.aspx?pageid=9" address to just a random string of numbers.html such as
"21927562.html". I have all of the pages, but the links to the style sheets and
other pages are messed up. If I go in and manually correct them to the right
files locations on my internal drive, they work and look just like they do on
the site. I will keep putting the screws to them and seeing if we can't get
access to the FTP server and the files.

Your response does seem to have answered the question about the templates and
editing multiple pages, though. Thank you.

Try this:

http://www.webassist.com/Products/Pr...ils.asp?PID=97

bregent,

That program looks like it might cover the other half of my issue. I'll check it out. Thanks for the help, both of you.

What's the name of the hosting company? I'd like to be sure to avoid them.

They're a small, local company in PA. I'll message you with their name,
BruceCSI2, because I'm hesistant to attach it to this thread given my manager
not wanting me to put specifics in this post. I'd be shocked if any of you were
likely to even have heard of them. I don't believe they have a large client
list (as I'm sure you can see why!)