Here's what has happened.

Jeremy and I have been volunteering at the Capital City Rescue Mission for the past couple months now. They have asked us to do a few things:

• Import their website to Macromedia Dreamweaver
• Fix their layout issues
• Set up a blog and show them how to use it

These may not seem like particularly difficult tasks, but updating the website is turning out to be a real ordeal. The company that built the site used very poor techniques. The worst is the tag soup, a mess of HTML with no layout or formatting and overlapping, unclosed, and depreciated tags. Also, there is no CSS, so the layout is built right into the content. The website is so bad that Dreamweaver is unable to open it.

In order to open the website in Dreamweaver, we have had to rebuild the website from the ground up using XHTML (a stricter subset of HTML) and CSS. This allows us to build a Dreamweaver template, so new pages can easily be added with little effort. Also, this separates the page's content from its presentation, so changes can be made without worrying if it will break borders.

The blog is not as big an issue; we have set up a simple Blogger blog, and we plan to make it match the website's theme. The problem here is that we would like to set the blog up on the Rescue Mission server, but we are not sure if the Mission allows external FTP. If it does not, the website will have to link to the blog on Blogger.

For our last couple visits, we have been slowly integrating the new, template-driven web pages into the old site, but none have been published to the public website yet. We hope to get something up on our next visit.

Works Cited

"Capital City Rescue Misison". <http://www.capitalcityrescuemission.com>