Newbie to WD6

[ligiabcs]

I've downloaded the trial of WD6 and I like what I'm seeing so far. I think like a designer, not a web developer, so I'm quite impressed that WD6 is so page layout focused.

I'm currently designing a small personal website (maybe 6-10 pages) to train on WD6.

HOWEVER, my main objective is to completely makeover my main website www.broadwaycafesociety.com in time for the site's 5th anniversary in December. It's a musical theatre fansite, built by me (through much blood, sweat & tears) about 4 years ago in Frontpage 2003. The site is around 100 pages at present with new pages added monthly. It does get a decent amount of traffic and has developed a following among the musical theatre community.

What I would like to respectfully request is that one of you WD6 gurus look over my current site and give me an honest, no-holds barred evalution of whether WD6 is the best solution for this makeover. I've read lot of posts in this forum and keep coming across issues like WD6 not being able to handle large sites, SEO conflicts, image naming snafus, etc. But I'm a risk taker so I may forge ahead anyway and see where the road takes me. I've done it before and I'll do it again.

Any advice or tips -- good, bad or ugly -- I'm open.

Thanks,
Ligia

[jimhanus]

ligiabcs,
Welcome to TG. I've used FrontPage for years and know how frustrating it can get. Your site isn't too complicated and can be made to look a lot better with WD6. My biggest site with WD6 is about 40 pages (45MB) without any problems (I've done about 25 sites so far). There have been some concerns about web sizes and uploading, but I've never seen it. To be safe, you can break your new site down into multiple webs. That way you're only dealing with smaller sizes making it easier and faster to upload. You seem to make use of a lot of widgets, add-ons, etc. which can be implemented easily with placeholders. WD6 doesn't make site-wide navigation automatically like you can in FrontPage, but that's not a big deal because you already know what your pages are and what they connect to. The new Na Bar tool will help also.
My best suggestion is to try making a sample page similar to your existing site and see how that goes. That will give you a good indication of how WD6 works. Once you understand how the software works and why it does what it does, things become a lot easier to understand. There are a lot of very smart people here on TG, plus the search function is a big help when trying to figure out how to proceed.
Good luck!

Jim

[ligiabcs]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for taking the time to look at my site.

Will do as you suggest. I'm still designing my template and learning the basics of WD6 so the conversion stage won't be happening for a while. But the adventure begins.

Onward and upward,
Ligia