New Templates; New Troubles.

I try to keep most of these posts rather generic, discussing my job and various aspects of it only as they apply to the discussion at hand. But this week, I probably should spend a few calories discussing the new Templates we are rolling out at work, and how that is going to affect a lot of people.

I really had high hopes, after checking out the Web site and reading the book that David Shea and Molly Holzschlag put together some years ago. One day, this is how all design changes would happen, right? I mean, as a proof-of-concept vehicle, the Web site proved it was not only possible, but made it look easy!

Well, of course, there’s easy and there’s easy. The task we are about to embark upon is easier than it might have been back in the Olden Days of font tags and tables. But it falls short of the dream of the one-button update by a ways.

There are things we should all be doing, now, to make our lives easier in the immediate future. First, validate page markup and CSS and get that out of the way. This is difficult enough when the markup is correct. Asking for a clean update when you start with poor markup is just asking for trouble.

I really like the idea of building a shadow site, a kind of a test site, and working on getting your pages updated in there. You can name this directory /beta2009/ or /beta/ or /incubator/ or whatever you’d like, then copy all of your page files into this new directory.

You need to point at this new directory with Dreamweaver. I copied my original site in the Manage Site box, then opened it up and changed the name and the URL strings for the Local, Remote and Testing servers. Go slowly here, and take your time and don’t do anything that you don’t fully understand, first. The goal is to end up with a site you can click on to open http://www.unl.edu/yoursite/ and one to open up http://www.unl.edu/yoursite/beta2009/. This new location features what we used to call “Security Through Obscurity”. Nobody should be visiting the pages here, because nobody will know they are there. They all reside within the unlinked directory /beta2009/ within your “real” site.

Having made the changes, consider making an archive of your site as it exists today. Name it site.zip and place this on your desktop, outside of the Dreamweaver environment. If you ever need to return to a current-template page, it will be in here.

Start slowly and deliberately and work your way through your new /beta2009/ site, document-by-document, folder-by-folder. From your Modify menu, you want to select Templates down at the bottom. Apply Template to Page... is the selection you want to make. We use the fixed-width Template, so select that one. There are elements we do not use this time, such as the college navigation area. You will want to map those to “Nowhere” and click “Use for all” and then “OK”. Your page should update into the new look. Save it and check it, remembering its new address in the /beta2009/ folder.

Remember you want to keep your own navigation and related links and footer information, so be careful when you un-pack your new Templates folder and sharedcode folder into your /beta2009/ site. Again, point and click and type slowly and make sure you understand what is expected to come up, at every point. Save often. Put often. Check your pages in a Web browser often. Check your old pages often, too, to make sure you aren’t working on the live pages.

Make whatever edits you need and consider how the extra room is going to be used in the new Template design. Maybe you have lists that could go in their own columns. Maybe you have styled certain page elements based on percentages and these are now not quite optimal, because the size of the container is bigger, now. Work your way through all of the pages in a folder before going on to the next one, starting at the documents at your root (top) level. When you are done, give yourself a day or two if you can and then come back and see how the pages look in the new design.

On the day of the rollout, drag your pages out of the /beta2009/ folder to make them live, replacing the information that is already there (and which you have safely copied into your .zip file). Then just wait for the accolades to roll in.

I suspect we will all meet somewhere the evening of the 17th and toss back a few, raising toasts to the valiant crew of the Web Developer Network. I suspect that some of us will want a few drinks by then. And some of us will probably need them.

Good luck!