Important editing guidance notes

There are two important editing problems:

Unwanted 'classes'

Lots of unintended 'class' codes are appearing in the code for many pages. This affects the way text appears in some browsers and can cause problems. It seems to come from editing via Dreamweaver8 which tries to be helpful by watching how text is formatted, storing that format as, say, 'class1' and then, when another bit if text is edited, offering 'class1' to the user. Now this probably looks OK and may even seem helpful but it isn't as different types of internet browser will give different priority to which formatting instruction is obeyed. The use of these 'classes' would be fine if we had one set for the whole site, which is a good idea one day but not very quick to do now! As it is each page has odd 'classes' of its own which is not good.

So, when entering any text, or editing any existing text, it is very important to watch what the text proerties window says. Choose 'none' for the box that may say 'paragraph' or something. In any box that says 'class1' 'class2' or whatever, change that to none. The required font, size and colour need to be entered and not left to either default of class-allocated. If this continues to be a problem it may be better to return to Dreamweaver MX for site management, which is simpler.

The only 'classes' that should be used are 'one', 'two' 'three' etc which I have designed for links. If a new type is required I'll create it.

Overwriting recent changes with older files

There have been many instances of files that I have updated or corrected being changed back to their original state (maybe with new entries or text). This is happening because the file being uploaded must be being based on a local, unedited copy and not the on-line, remote or server copy. Where more than one person edits a page it is absolutely vital that the remote file is the one edited. To ensure this, download (or get) the file from the remote view and overwrite your local copy. Then edit that copy and save it. That will save it to your local folder and it then needs to be uploaded.

As a check, I am now including updated on (date and time) at the foot of every page as I edit them. I shall also add this line to all the other pages eventually. This should make it easy to compare the date on the copy you are editing to that displayed on the site. If the file you are about to edit has the wrong date then it is the wrong one!