Advice on how to update my site more efficiently?

[deadbattery]

Hi everybody,

I've been looking for some advice on how to update my current website and this place looks quite friendly, so I hope you don't mind me asking a few questions

I'm an illustrator on the third year of my course and I desperately need to change how my website is coded. It's a requirement of the course to build a website, but they only have time to teach us over four sessions, so the teacher strongly suggests building the layout in Photoshop then slicing it up into Dreamweaver for direct upload. It worked out fine and I have a website that I'm happy with, but I've recently realised that it seems like quite a lame method and is very hard to update.

I don't have much website building experience so I didn't think about it at the time, but I can't seem to make much sense of adding new images to it. I figure I need to go back to the Photoshop file and add in the images and slice them, then rename everything to fit the existing structure and basically shunt everything along. I'm not sure if that's correct but I can't see any other way around it! The other issue I have is that my illustration descriptions are all images too, which means I can't edit them in Dreamweaver. You can see my site here.

I would like to have the same layout but so that everything's editable in Dreamweaver, so I can swap out images easily etc. What would be the best way to do this? I've been trying to build a layout using div tags but I don't think I'm going about it the right way.

Can any one suggest what my next step should be please? I'm quite persistent and can pick things up quickly, but it would be great to know if I'm going in the right direction first!

Thank you!
Cathy

 

[Rumpleteazer]

Not sure I can help you with coming up with anything more efficient, but from practical experience I would suggest that you always backup what you have done before you do any editing - it can get very messy if you go wrong, so if need be you can go to your backup file and start again.

 

[ronaldroe]

You forgot to post your link, so I can't give you specific advice, but here's a bit of quick, general info.

Due to your situation, in which it sounds like you don't have time to learn the best way to do everything right now, here's a quick way to make changes: As long as the new images are the same size, you can replace the old ones without it messing up the layout. So, just make your new images the same size as the old ones and use the same file name, then overwrite the original in the file folder. This will allow you to replace the previous images with new ones without coding anything at all. Regarding the text, you can slice the text separate from the image. Then, right click the slice with the slice tool and set the slice type to "no image". This will allow you to place text there instead of an image.

Now, I will warn you. The above is terrible advice. However, if you're in a crunch, it will work for now. The long-term solution is to learn HTML and CSS and code everything from scratch. And believe me, from the sound of it, the site would likely need to be recoded from the ground up. It sounds like a lot of work, but in the end it would be infinitely more efficient. That, or commission someone to do it for you.