A good place to start

Hi Keith -- you have extended an invitation to this group to Robin Dampier. Her website, http://NC-Hendersonville.com had been created by me "years back" when I was actively working with sellers and buyers. I sold Robin the site and joined her as her licensed Web Assistant and maintain the site.

It was created with Front Page using the WySIWYG attributes and is in desparate need of updating and bringing into compliance mark up wise (an understatement!)

I've purchased EW2 and numerous books to start learning the whole process properly -- a formidable task! After mucking around with it all for over a year I've finally come to accept the fact that if I want to learn how to create compliant websites I need to do it the hard way -- become very familiar and knowledgeable with HTML for structure and CSS for styling. If the non-compliant FP Site is just imported into EW it's a huge job to try and fix things.

But, to address your post re helpful sites this is one that is very useful with tutorials and a great bunch of folks to help answer questions on their forum:

http://expression-web-designer-help.com

Hope this helps someone and have a great day. Sue

Sue,

Like you, I started with Front Page. I knew it had bad coding, but it is what I had, so I used it. A couple of months ago I purchased EW2 and hoped you could just convert sites from Front Page to EW2. Of course you can't. At first I was totally frustrated, especially because someone had asked me to design a site for her and I needed to learn it so she could maintain the site. I serached on-line for help, but was frustrated even more!

Keith Byrd told me that you can still design sites using paragraphcs and tables like you did with Front Page. I still couldn't get one started. So I took one of the sample sites that I liked the basic format of, deleted all but the default page and started working. Within a couple of weeks I had a website and several pointer domain sites within this same site set up.

Here is an example of what I did:

http://www.FindStCharlesCountyRealEstate.com (the main site)

http://www.StCharlesCountyHomeBuyerSeminars.com

http://www.StCharlesNewHomeCenter.com

Now I just need to get the rest of my websites done. Right now I'm working on 2 more pointer domains off of this site. Once you get over the frustration, it isn't that hard to get going with it.

Good luck.

Linda Grissette, The Best Seller GMAC Real Estate, St Charles County, Missouri, mailto:Linda@Grissette.com. Check out my real estate products and services at http://www.RealEstateMarketingHelp.com. All the products are currently on sale.

Thanks Sue, for contributing - I'll check out that link. I did find an email from Robin in my archives asking about Expression Web, so I sent her the invitation. I'm glad she sent it over to you.

It's a shame there's no easy site conversion from FrontPage to Expression, but that goes to show you there were a lot of non-standard practices being used over the years by FP. It sounds like you are going about it the right way, immersing yourself in HTML and CSS.

We hope you'll come back and post some more thoughts and ideas along the way.

Hi Linda,

That second link doesn't work. Was it supposed to be....

StCharlesHomeBuyerSeminars.com ?

Thanks as well for contributing. Let me know when you're ready to upload another site.

Keith

Hi Linda -- Yes, I read the issues you were having re FP/EW on RealTalk a little while back -- I've mostly lurked on RealTalk for many years and faithfully read it. Things have changed over the years quite a bit and I miss many of the folks who no longer post -- Carolyn in Canada mentioned that yesterday.

I've spent/wasted a lot of time trying to get the site to look like I want it using EW Templates; purchasing tons of other programs looking/hoping for an easy solution, but, have finally decided that -- as long as the existing FP site remains on page 1 and/or 2 on the search engines (including Google) I'm now going to devote the time to learning it all -- proper html and CSS and putting a site(s) together using External Style Sheets. At the age of 67 I don't know how many more years I'll be doing this and I want to get a site together for Robin that someone else will be able to maintain when it becomes necessary.

Sue

Hi Keith -- I may have spoke with you at some time at Internet Crusade. NC-Hendersonville has been hosted by them for a longggg time along w/lots of domain names and email forwarding for NC-Hendersonville to suenett@mchsi.com! When I sold the site to Robin I had it all switched over into Robin's name. I'm/Robin still using the FP Extensions until I have a new site up that I'm happy with & than I think/know I'll be looking into switching to FTP -- ah, with technology I'm also behind!

Sue

Sue, we probably did speak at some point. It looks like we set you up with FrontPage hosting back in Jan 2003. Let me know if you want some hosting space set up to experiment with Expression Web. As a current hosting customer, we can set you up free of charge using a test domain. This is what we did for Linda, and it worked out well. She had us then repoint the "real domain" at her new site.

Linda actually used the FrontPage Extensions to publish because she had some FrontPage created forms she wanted to keep. But we can also set up a directory for use with FTP if preferred. Just let me know, either via this forum, or via email, if you'd like to try it out.

See what happens when I type without thinking....especially when I am actually working on a website!

It was http://www.StCharlesHomeBuyerSerminars.com I usually put "County" on my domains, but that just made it way too long!

Linda