Topic awaiting preservation: website redesign / templating

Jambo.

I may have to redesign a site which has over 1500 pages of HTML 3.2 which is littered with tables, useless Javascript rollovers and applets. Developed in NetObjects Fusion... its bad.

I though that there might just be an easy way out, some sort of HTML converter. Dreamwaever has an option to clean up HTML but only on single pages and does not convert the HTML to HTML / CSS based layout. Anyone know of any tools / toys / suggestions that might help?

I am dreading the thought of having to recode all those pages!

Am I just being lazy?

FR

I don't think you're being lazy (1500, yikes), but I also don't think you'll end up with any good results unless you completely redo it from scratch.

FatRod, here's a tool to tidy up html code. I have never used it though, and don't know what it does exactly, but it is recomended in "Eric Meyer on CSS book (which I ahve partly read and think it's very useful). Have a look!
I hope this will help you a bit... and.. good luck!

After reading reiso's post, I'm just adding that this kind of tools might just help you tidyind up a bit and avoid you part of the work, but it's probably worth going through all the pages yourself after...

(Edited by kimson on 06-13-2005 15:02)

Thanks. i'll check out the HTML tidy tonight. I can feel my balls tighten at the thought..... I think a lot of what i need to do can be achieved with DreamWeaver MX 04's handy entire site find and replace function [ er find and delete would be more apt ].

I think the plan is to stip out all *nasty* code and just dump it into a template.

Cheers

FR

http://valet.htmlhelp.com - online version of HTMLTIDY, still din't convert embedded style to CSS but that might not be a bad thing... found 357 errors on the the index page that it could not fix Ahhhhhhhhh.
1499 to go
FR

though it seems like you have a rather large task infront of you I think you best 'tiddyup' option is to actually go through all 1500 pages and see where you can 'tiddyup' that total page count .. then from there seperate each page into a category that relates to other pages in the same category and from that begin to work on new code/layers SITE

by the sounds of it I think your going to spead to much time locating bad code and cleaning up rather creating a new site .. from my personal experience .. and no matter how little or big the job was .. I've notice that trying to do clean up work for someone else's coding job actually takes more time and more effort then just starting from scratch .. and not to mention even cleaning up the code doesn't help sometimes you don't get everything and to top it all off it's still not your own creation .. your just working on updating someone else's creation .. just my 2 cents

[edit: spelling]

.::. cEll .::. 513

(Edited by RammStein on 06-13-2005 17:28)

yep dude, your doomed. I work for a design firm where they were a bit sloppy code wise (actually dreamweaver abuse) and I'm fixing up a lot of things now. Good thing about redesign is that you already have the content however. So it's best that you just bite the bullet, create a homepage and template. And start copy and pastin' away!!

See nobody told us about the monotonous, tedious side to our business. We tend to think of only the creative site. I've been staring at the same site for almost two weeks now and I'm ready to explode!!

But overall it's good.

have fun.

I don't know if it'll re-insure you but Last summer I've been contracted to clean ( that is make comply with the HTML 4.01, CSS 2.0 and WAI-A standards ) a site with ~20.000 pages, in 4 languages, done between 1995 and 2004 using various tools. It took me 2 months at full time to make the scripts ( in JavaScript and PHP ) to crawl and clean the whole site.

It may be a big task, but honestly I think you'd better make a similar script to crawll and clean the site. Even if you can automatize the sanitizing of the pages with HTML Tidy, the pages won't ( or will badly ) use your pretty new templates made of standard (X)HTML and CSS, and their HTML markup will remain a mess ... sure it will be a valid mess, but a semantical mess anyway.

[edit]
If the global layout of the pages is rather coherent, it shouldn't take more than 2-3 weeks to make a crawler/cleaner script. Now your client has 3 options :

1. hire some rookies to recreate the 1,500 pages but he can be sure it will rather take 3 months than 3 weeks,
2. drop the 1,500 pages,
3. add 3 man weeks of an intermediate/senior developer to the project to get his dirty site cleaned.

[/edit]



(Edited by poi on 06-13-2005 21:14)