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Marty
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I am building my first site in DW using Artisteer. Now although I love the designs it can come up with there have been a few questions in my project that I need help with. Thanks in advance if you can share.
1. Do your html designs have different templates? I like my index page to be slightly different than my content pages so using the same theme I made some alteration (simplify) to the index page. Is this a common strategy?
2. When you export a theme into a folder, do you leave all the css and image files in those folders, or do you try to combine the template themes into a single folder before FTP?
3. When I open a theme in DW, there seems to be excess positioning outlines of certain elements. For example one of my READ MORE buttons extends the full width of the them in DW, but it shows up properly in the preview. It's just a little more difficult to work with that way.
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Dave Porter
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HI Marty,
1) This is an interesting thought, I can think of one way, but it is a little messy and needs a fair bit of messing around with the code. So I would be interested in hearing what others think.
2) No you must leave it as it is. If you placed all the files in one folder, you would need to change all the references to the folder names, which is just creating work for no reason.
3) DW is not suitable for editing exported artisteer files. This has been discussed many times - do a search to view the previous discussions...
HTH Dave
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Marty
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Thanks for your reply Dave.
I now see the structure of exporting the files, makes it almost impossible to use 2 different templates for one site, without going through a lot destination coding. So uggh. That's too bad because it is somewhat restrictive. Possibly in a future update, when creating a template there can be an option for index template, and various content templates that might be better shaped or layed out for videos, blogging, articles, gallerys etc. You could build all these templates under one single theme and all of the elements would go into a single CSS and image folders. The reason I have two widths, is because the main page was going to be like a sales page, and the content pages were going to be key-word focused blogs and have different navigation.
Now about DW, I am rather surprised to hear this, since it is an industry standard. I am new to the product and forum, and never thought to look for difficulties between the 2 programs.
I am currently building a site while learning this software, and using DW. Save for the slightly messed up CSS and utterly slow response time (VISTA, I disc in other post), well it works fine. Are you saying that people use something other than DW to create their HTML sites with Artisteer templates?
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Randy
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Marty -
I am learning/using Artisteer to build a standard HTML website while I learn to use a CMS (Joomla) for the future update. For now I am using the free trial version of the CoffeeCup HTML Editor and it works great! I plan on activating it to have as another tool in the toolbox. The ability to use Art...to generate the CSS has been really good for me to learn how this all fits together. For me, my main learning issues have been 1) how to use the "read more..." feature and 2) creating the links to the content pages. If you have any advice on those, I'd love to hear it! In the meantime, Ill continue to poke around the forums here for answers!
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Paul
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DW is one of the standards for WYSIWYG editors. For text editors there are many more out there if you prefer to code the HTML directly.
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David
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I haven't tested this,
but I think having different designs per page wouldn't be that difficult at all. If I'm correct, you should be able to do this:
1.) Create your first template and save it.
2.) Now in your HTML site folder, create a sub-folder and name it something unique for that template, such as temp1 or something.
3.) Now copy all of your artisteer template files into that folder.
4.) Cut/Copy page.html into the HTML site folder, so therefore it will be before your sub-folder containing all of your artisteer template files.
5.) Open the moved file "page.html" with a text editor such as notepad or something.
6.) In the header tags where it says src="script.js", href="style.css", href="style.ie6.css", and href="style.ie7.css" add the directory name to them.
Example: src="temp1/script.js", href="temp1/style.css" and so on.
Also open your style.css, style.ie6.css, and style.ie7.css files and do the same with them. I recommend using search and find any of the entries with images/ and change them to temp1/images and so on. If these are wrong, your template won't display correctly since it cannot find the image files.
Even though the style sheets are in the correct relative folder to the images folder, it must reflect correctly from where the html file using the style sheet is relative to the images folder, if that makes sense.
That will fix your style sheets and menu and it should display correctly now in the browser.
If you wish to use the images in the default page export, correct the paths to reflect the directory changes where instances of the photos are in the code.
7.) Repeat steps 1 - 3 and name the subfolder for the second template something like temp2.
8.) Now re-name page.html to something else, such as page2.html, and then copy it to the same folder you copied page.html to in step 4.
9.) Now do steps 5 & 6 and make sure it reflects the correct folder, such as temp2 or whatever you named it.
You should now be able to simply change out the header tags to call on whichever template you wish to use for that particular page.
I hope that helps.
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Linda
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You are making this way more complicated than needed.
Make two templates. Install both templates.
In Joomla Admin/Extensions/Template Manager:
Make the one you want to be your home page as default.
Assign the other template to the menu pages you want it to use. Edit template and change Menu Assignment from All to Select from List.
See this in action: www.canterusa.org. Each affiliate uses a different template.
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Ray
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I followed your advise. I have created two templates. My main template is default. No problem. When I go into the other template and choose the menu from the list - it is selectable, I assign the menu to that template and save it.
I refresh my home page and test the menu and it will not show the template assigned to that menu item? So, I'm not sure of what I'm doing incorrectly. Any advise??
Thanks
Ray
Quote Linda:
You are making this way more complicated than needed.
Make two templates. Install both templates.
In Joomla Admin/Extensions/Template Manager:
Make the one you want to be your home page as default.
Assign the other template to the menu pages you want it to use. Edit template and change Menu Assignment from All to Select from List.
See this in action: www.canterusa.org. Each affiliate uses a different template.
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