Topic: How to change colors

hi,

I have been asked by a friend to help with the monumental task of changing the background, border, text colors, font, font color, etc. on 1000 pages. This seems absolutely insane to me. I've never done this before - there's got to be an easier way! I don't think this person used a stylesheet to begin with. What can I do at this stage? It's taking me over 2 minutes per page to make all of the changes as he described. At this rate, wake me up at Christmas! He's sent me dreamweaver files for each page he wants me to help change the colors. Please, anyone, point me in the right direction! I'm not a webmaster.

Thanks
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Software development company

(Edited by kim123 on 02-03-2009 08:32)

(Edited by kim123 on 02-03-2009 09:06)

Depends on the exact circumstances, but any within-file-replacement utility (even most advanced text editors can do this) can help you here if the pages are similar enough that you can find appropriate search & replace strings.

But professionally (which your link seems to indicate), you'd parse the pages, extract the colors into a central stylesheet, fix the tags appropriatly, inject the stylesheet, verify that the pages look the same as they did before and then change the colors in the stylesheet.
Beautifoul Soup might come in handy for this.

Actually you should be able to "find and replace" in a bunch of files in Dreamveawer. Also there's a nice tool for windows called PowerGREP but it's not free either.

Any half decent text editor should be able to do macros and search&replace in a folder.

But in the vein of what Tyberius Prime said, the time and money spent doing and verifying ALL the search&replace is certainly better spent on style overhaul to at least use a minimal stylesheet and a few classname or more appropriate (semantic) markup.

You can override inline formatting with external CSS, with !important if necessary. It is not ideal, but you don't sound like you are really in the mood for idealism.

(Edited by reisio on 02-04-2009 00:26)

who are you and what have you done to our reisio, the herald of standards and doing things bloody right?!?

Well kim's already not doing it right, as has been pointed out. If you're going to do it wrong, at least don't spend too much time on it.