Dreamweaver Templates? Alternatives?

[grindleydesigns]

We are working on a site overhaul for our company’s “antique” retail site. Probably hasn’t been updated in more than a decade. Anyway, we are trying to make this more easily manageable in the long run. I’m hoping to get some opinions of Dreamweaver’s template feature and if you have any better suggestions for making sitewide changes easily. I just switched to web design from graphic/print design a while back, so I’m still learning a lot as I go along. Any thoughts, suggestions, etc. would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Paulie_D]

Others will comments with wider experience, I am sure but I find the DW templates rather unwieldy.

I have limited experience with it but PHP seems, to me, to be better suited as you can just define ‘reusable bits’ like headers, footers, modules etc and just decide to include them in pages or not.

[grindleydesigns]

Thanks for the reply Paulie_D, I agree completely that DW templates are indeed unwieldy. I would much rather use something other than DW altogether, but I’m stuck using what everyone else is using. This whole redesign is quite overwhelming.

[JohnMotylJr]

My suggestion, dont rely on any templates except one you design yourself. Of course use something as a reference if needed. I have never done a complete redesign, well yeah kinda, but not really in this situation.

I find that when you have A LOT of work to do, like in programming, just break your tasks into little chunks than piece them together.

Remember that web development is fun and it shouldn’t be miserable, although we all have those days where stuff just doesn’t seem to work right.

Since you are ‘stuck’ using DW why not just create a template on your own than import it into DW as a template.

– Are you looking for a responsive type of template, or just something to start with?

[Paulie_D]

@John. He’s not talking about design/layout templates.

DW uses ‘templates’ for areas/elements that repeat across multiple pages and making an update to the element in the template will iterate across all pages using that template.

These elements can be editable on certain pages or non-editable. It’s even possible to have mini-‘templates’ inside other templates.

Frankly, on a large site it’s a whole mess of trouble waiting to happen unless you really know what you are doing.

Depending on his company’s willingness &/or IT capabilities, I would argue that DW and static pages aren’t the way to go.

I would be looking into a CMS like WordPress or Drupal

[grindleydesigns]

Yes, what we’re doing is taking a design that we created and turning it into a template with certain editable areas for specific page content. Would something like WordPress or Drupal work for large ecommerce sites? I have only played around with WP a little and don’t know the limitations of any CMS out there.

[Paulie_D]

WP powers many of the world’s largest sites including, I believe, Ford, WSJ etc etc.

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