Expression Web Forum

I finally bit the bullet and completely replaced my FrontPage site with an all-new Expression Web site. All was well until I realized I had put pages in folders that used to be under the root. For example, www.tedknight.com/weddings.htm had become www.tedknight.com/weddings/weddings.htm .

Lacking Navigation View, I decided to cut/paste the page from My Computer even though I recalled it might cause problems. Sure enough, all the links broke. But once I opened the DWT, corrected the link target URL, and re-published, the updated button worked fine.

I set about changing several similar pages, for example link/links.htm to links/htm, and songlists/songlists.htm. In case you're wondering why I bothered, in the case of the weddings URL it is in use at several referring sites. For all of them, it seems simpler and more elegant to be able to type the address without the superfluous sub-folder.

At any rate, I have only been able to get a couple of the other links on my home page to publish correctly. It occurs to me that maybe EW is only making one correction at a time. When I did a single page, no problem. When I tried to update six or seven at once...problem!

So you know, I learned some interesting stuff around 5am, by trial and error. For example, EW created a homepage called default.htm. My homepage up till now has been index.htm. I got errors until I deleted index.htm on the remote site, renamed default.htm to index.htm on my PC, and then published again. This may be elementary to more experienced webmasters but it was important to me, and the Help file was no help. There were a bunch of other things I did by trial and error, with my heart in my throat for fear I would do irreperable damage. I hope this doesn't sound petulant. I post partly to get answers but also to share my own experience in case it will help others.

Okay some basics on website structure.

 Every folder needs a default page.. Yes, I know that the website templates that ship with Expression Web have every page in a separate folder with a file named for the folder name like about/about.html. This is very, very bad practice and something I have bitched about to Microsoft on more than one occasion.  Using your songlists/songlists.htm example it should be songlists/index.html. That way if someone just types in http://site.tld/songlists they will get the page. your visitor may get a list of all the files in the directory depending on how your hosting is configured if you do not have a default page in the folder .

Windows servers configured out of the box use default.htm or default.html for the home page. Linux servers typically use index.html out of the box. Most hosts whether on Windows or Linux servers seem to prefer index.html. In a new Expression Web site that has a default.html page in it right click and change the name from default.html to index.htmll so that Expression will know it is the home page. If you created your local site with a new empty web so you could publish down an existing site, once the site has been published down right click on the index.html page and select "Set as Home Page" if Expression doesn't recognize it as the home page automatically.

To have Expresssion Web update your hyperlinks go to Site > Site Settings and make sure that there is a checkmark in the box that says something like "use meta data to manage this web site". Then in folder view drag your fiile to the correct location. Using your /links/links.htm example drag the links.htm page out from the links folder to the root of your site. Then you should get an alert box that asks you if you want to update the links to the page. Click OKAY and all the links in your site will be updated. Repeat for each page you want to move to new location or rename.

 Instead of just learning by trial and error why not watch the free beginner level  video on creating a basic website at http://by-expression.com/media/p/1300.aspx