Large website re-design

[Guest]

My website is becoming very popular and it is very large now. I currently
have over 1,000 pages and we expect to keep growing by 340 pages a year for
a while. It was design ms frontpage and still maintained in frontpage 2003.

(Note: I use ms frontpage because of the code view and the ability to
preview the page before saving.)

I am having a few difficulties…

1) The website takes forever to publish, so I have broken the big folders
into subwebs .

2) Is there a limit
to the number of pages I can have?

Is there away that i could maybe change over to having the content come out
of a database?

Please help!

 

[Jens Peter Karlsen[FP MVP]]

1. Sounds sensible.
2. No.
3. You can write such a solution in ASP(.NET) or PHP.

Regards Jens Peter Karlsen. Microsoft MVP - Frontpage.

 

[Andrew Murray]

comments in line...below

My website is becoming very popular and it is very large now. I currently
have over 1,000 pages and we expect to keep growing by 340 pages a year
for
a while. It was design ms frontpage and still maintained in frontpage
2003.

(Note: I use ms frontpage because of the code view and the ability to
preview the page before saving.)

I am having a few difficulties.

1) The website takes forever to publish, so I have broken the big folders
into subwebs .

2) Is there a limit
to the number of pages I can have?

[ --- The only limit I can think of is the limit of the disk space you have
with your host otherwise no....I don't believe there's any limit. Good idea
though, doing the subwebs thing. ---]

Is there away that i could maybe change over to having the content come
out
of a database?

[ --- Doing a database would certainly, improve things; however if you're a
novice on that subject it may be a very steep learning curve. There's only
so much the database results wizard can do (if you planned on using
it)....but it could do (very) basic content management; I use the DRW to do
that myself - on a small site, mind you (30 pages give or take 1 or 2).

On the other hand, if you want a content management system you'll need the
script(s) to suit your Operating system e.g. perl/cgi or PHP for *nix or
ASP, ASPX or .Net (same thing?) for Windows, and probably a MySQL database
as an Access database wouldn't cope with the size of your site (sql allows
more simultaneous connections too if your site has large volume of visitors
daily), and isn't supported in *nix anyway.

If your site (1000 pages?) is a headache to maintain and a lot of content
changes frequently, then database managed content would be the way to go.

Other than the above, sorry I don't know how to implement such a system.

www.hotscripts.com might be a starting point - lots of good scripts for all
platforms. Look under the "content management" or "web portal" type
categories.----]

 

[Murray]

Before doing anything major, I would suggest you make sure you are using
your existing tools optimally - the most likely candidates for this would be
a) server-side includes, and b) CSS page styling.

Both of these will allow changes to a single file to propagate throughout
your site.

Are you using them?

 

[Guest]

I have alot of server-side includes which helps a little. But I don't have
the funds at the moment to invest in sql server but I do have ms access 2003.
Can anyone walk me through or suggest a site that can help me design the new
database and pages that will pull from the database?