I’m looking for ideas and suggestions please… I’ve googled all day and have come across a number of forum posts but no real solution that works for me. I started my PatriotWorld website in 2002 using Frontpage and have been using the WYSIWYG software ever since to update the site with increasing number of problems. I’m continually having Frontpage Extension errors with my hosting company and cannot update the site without contacting them to reinstall the extensions which takes quite a bit of time and is a total hassle. Worse still, when they redo the .htaccess for the extensions, it replaces my .htaccess file for my podcast redirect. (I’ve since discovered that my feed hasn’t been working for the past two shows.. thankfully, it’s not football season, or worse yet, training camp.)

So… here’s where I stand: I’ve since switched to Mac and am loving my MBP so if I wanted to cut ties completely from the PC, I would have to move away from Frontpage anyway. However, I really don’t mind keeping all the website crap there since I would prefer not to clutter up this laptop with 6 years worth of website content. So, I have no problem staying PC for the site only. (I’m still using the PC for Castblaster as well, but that’s another story completely.)

  • I can still edit pages using FP but can’t update the site via FP because it won’t connect due to the extension errors.
  • I can upload pages via the Bluehost FTP but can’t update the shared borders (header of my site pages!) because the files are hidden and do not show up on the PC side of the FTP panel.

I’ve looked into Kompozer based on recommendations from the folks at Bluehost but it saves all pages as .html and my site’s 100+ pages have extensions of .htm. There’s no way around that either. I tried making new pages with the extension of .html with the intent to change hyperlinks and delete the originals if necessary but they won’t upload at all and are giving an “unknown error”.

So… I’m looking for suggestions if anyone has any. (Spending $400 bucks for Dreamweaver is not something that I’m willing to do and I don’t know if it would be a smooth transition from Frontpage anyway.) Another option would be to try to start the site all over using another software or something like Wordpress but just having lots of fixed pages instead of blog entries. Either way, that would be TONS of work to recreate all of that content.

I’m sure I’m not the first to defect from Frontpage so I’m sending out an SOS for suggestions about where to go from here. Any and all suggestions are welcome!

Thanks!

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kjcardoza on May 10th, 2008 | File Under technology | -