Did you take advantage of the 30-day fully functional trial period to examine the features prior to purchasing the product?

I'd love to be able to easily replicate my existing site and get it into a state where I could integrate the shoppingcart software - however, I can't find an easy way to get the whole thing imported and it's driving me quietly scatty - ok, I probably started off scatty:D

I'd love to know if you think the software is capable of doing this -

Margaret

Hiya Alexander,

If you take a look at most of the posts here that have to do with importing sites to VSD you'd realize that it's not possible at all. The only thing you can do is build it from scratch. Having said that, you can do just about anything you need to with VSD for building a site and it has a lot of features.

As for the Shopping cart software, it does not "integrate" persay into any site at all as it is basically a stand alone site all by itself. What many do is link their current sites to their shops on their menus and in a few areas of their current sites. Many also do what I did and create external pages using HTML Editor (or in your case VSD) and using the home page from that as the home page for the entire site/shop by setting up the Home page in the Shopping Cart Creator to go to the URL of the external home page.

Other than that, there's no importing at all into VSD as it keeps it's files in a specific file with a .vnu extension which has no import capabilities.

I don't think either solution is working for what I want. I thought i needed html editor but I didnt have a visual design button, so I changed it out for visual design. But I am not building websites from scratch, I really want to visually edit html code that I import. From what I can tell, Coffee cup cant ful fill this desire any more efficiently than the html editor in my email marketing software program. If I am wrong, please advise.

Hiya Diane,

Although I wouldn't say that the HTML Editor has an "awesome" visual editor, it definitely has one, you just have to turn it on in the settings. Once you do this though, be aware that the code and visual tabs do not play nice together and you need to choose to use one or the other for a page as swapping back and forth will definitely alter your code and in most cases it's not a pretty picture.

You can turn on the visual tab by going to the Tools >> Preferences
On that first General tab, left side, middle area is a radio button to choose what you want to see etc.

Hope that helps and good luck whichever way you end up going

Visual Site Designer is pretty cool and will serve most folks well. I created a site in blazing time and it looks pretty good.

http://www.thirdwaveit.com

There are some limitations to VSD that are noteworthy for more advanced users. Without the ability to edit HTML directly, you are left to the design of the software. So if the feature isn't there, you are out of luck. Two big ones for me:

- unable to remove title text (creates the "hover-over" description when you hold your mouse over a picture). I wanted alt text for SEO reasons, but didn't want the hover-overs...VSD puts in both and you can't change it.

- unable to create links that open in new tabs. VSD opens the link in the same window. Has the "new window" option for document attachments, but not for regular links.

It is the fastest design software I've ever seen...and I've tried a bunch. It blows the other simple WYSISWG editors away. There are no comparisons. And no amateur is going to sit down at Dreamweaver CS5 and whip out a website.

So I highly recommend VSD, as long as you're ok with finding some small limitations along the way.

Yes you can.
http://esmansgreenhouse.com/yourteam.html


Yes you can.
http://esmansgreenhouse.com/products.html



I agree. This software can do a lot more then people think.

Why wouldn't you want the "hover overs"
SEO uses these.
I put in photo titles for the photo, followed up with either the web address or some keywords from that page that I want the SEO robots to see - again.
It's another way to get your site noticed.
Alt titles are important, but why not use all the tools available?
rodgw

Also don't forget you have the HTML Tool and other tools to insert scripts that you want to use that don't come with VSD so you really can add many things that VSD doesn't offer on it's own. Never really "stuck" with what VSD can do only

I am also interested in converting a large site from Dreamweaver to CC. It has hundreds of pages and thousands of photos, so I will not redo the whole site. I have made a new home page in VSD, with an image map and links to the other pages in the site. Should I just upload the new page using an FTP program? or do I have to put all of the files into CC VSD and reload it all that way? Also if I make more pages in CC that go into the site, how is it best to integrate them with DW? (Yes, an import feature would be great!)

If I were to go the route of importing the whole site into the HTML editor, how much can it hold? I absolutely do not want to make any changes to what I already have on the site. Only to convert it into CC VSD. The site is mdweil.com