I shall be redoing a site for a new client shortly that basically is giving the site a more designed feel.
As I did not develop the last site, is there a way of ‘extracting’ the site in its entirity from the web?
All I want is the links to other pages (there’s a LOT!)
I want to know if it’s possible as the old site comes offline in mid feb and extracting the site would be very useful so I dont have to manually record all the links before I start the new one.
Any advice?
Hi David,
I’ve used SiteSucker (http://www.sitesucker.us/mac.html) in the past to download and archive existing sites. As long as the settings are correct, and you give it enough time to do it’s job then it usually manages very well in pulling the site down to your hard drive.
Regards,
Tim.
On 26 Jan 2011, at 09:53, David B wrote:
I shall be redoing a site for a new client shortly that basically is giving the site a more designed feel.
As I did not develop the last site, is there a way of ‘extracting’ the site in its entirity from the web?
All I want is the links to other pages (there’s a LOT!)
I want to know if it’s possible as the old site comes offline in mid feb and extracting the site would be very useful so I dont have to manually record all the links before I start the new one.
Any advice?
Hi Tim, I hope I can pick up on this and that you could possible advise. I have a particular site which we set up on Freeway Pro 5.5. We have outsourced some specific SEO work on it, which has been done and continues to be tweaked.
Problem we’ve run in to is that every time the client requests changes to the site content, we make them, re publish and upload, which obviously affects the on site SEO work as it overwrites it. Would Site Sucker retrieve the site as a Freeway file, which would include the SEO work that the sub contractor has done to the site files?
Freeway writes HTML, but it doesn’t read it very well. Freeway’s
native page description language is a much richer object model than
HTML can support, and the publishing process could be loosely
described as “dumbing down” that model into HTML and CSS.
All that to say that what you can download from the server won’t be of
much use to Freeway.
What you will need to do is merge the changes made by your SEO
contractor back into the Freeway page, which means getting into that
HTML, comparing it with the raw output from Freeway, and using the
various markup insertion and Extended dialogs in Freeway to duplicate
the changes.
This does put the onus on you to understand the HTML as well as how
Freeway generated it. A good “diff” tool is essential to visualize
this, as well as some basic understanding of how HTML is formed at the
code level.
The good news is that this is totally do-able, and you can learn it.
But the bad news is that it’s a bit of an uphill struggle until you
get a foothold in the part of the Web design process (the code) that
many Freeway users run screaming from.
Walter
On Jul 22, 2011, at 5:38 AM, matt covarr wrote:
Problem we’ve run in to is that every time the client requests
changes to the site content, we make them, re publish and upload,
which obviously affects the on site SEO work as it overwrites it.
Would Site Sucker retrieve the site as a Freeway file
Hi Matt,
On the flip side to what Walter suggests you could isolate the areas in the site that need updating and use a content management system running on the server to update the site. Assuming the site changes can be isolated like this and really only mean editing mainly text and some inline images you should be OK. Although Walter’s suggestion of integrating the SEO updates into your Freeway document is the best in the long term it may prove to be more work than the project warrants.
Neither are perfect solutions as each will require a certain amount of work but you should get to where you want to be in the end with either method.
Regards,
Tim.
On 22 Jul 2011, at 11:55, Walter Lee Davis wrote:
What you will need to do is merge the changes made by your SEO contractor back into the Freeway page, which means getting into that HTML, comparing it with the raw output from Freeway, and using the various markup insertion and Extended dialogs in Freeway to duplicate the changes.