Hey everyone,
Life’s been pretty hectic, so it’s been awhile since I’ve posted
here, but I’m in a pretty tough ‘Catch-22’, related to me
jewelry-sales website, and could really use some guidance, if anyone
here’s got any experience to offer. A little more than three years
ago, just before my wife and I relocated to our current home, a
friend of ours built me a really beautiful website for my gem and
jewelry business, temporarily populating it with hundreds of 'dummy’
files in the expectation that I’d soon replace them with ‘the real
McCoy’.
I had just begun to do that, and load copy onto the site when our
daughter arrived, several weeks early, and the ensuing years have
just been a blur, (as any active parent is all too well aware). This
weekend, I finally decided to buckle down, dig out Scott’s old notes
and try to unravel the whole website mess, for once and for all, and
that’s when I ran into one little snag: the Macromedia Dreamweaver
software it was built on has developed what the alert box informs me
is “a fatal exception”, and crashes within 30 seconds of beginning to
boot up. And, just to keep things interesting, I can’t seem to find
the original CD-ROMs or documentation anywhere, the guy who built the
site has relocated and left the design trade, and Adobe (which
apparently bought Macromedia, in the interim) no longer supports that
software! So, I now have this incredibly beautiful, but utterly
inoperable website to which I cannot seem to gain access.
Has anyone here been through this quagmire, already, and can you
offer any suggestions of ways in which I might both salvage the
layout and appearance of the current site – shy of spending tens of
thousands of dollars in software and geek-time – so as to be able to
update it? Or, for that matter, are there any less expensive but
still fully functional web editing programs that’d be able to read
the code from the current site and re-output it the same form, but in
a way that I could work on, myself?
I realize this isn’t a jewelry question, in the purest sense, but it
is a jewelry website question, and I know that many of you have
built your own sites, so I’m at least reasonably hopeful that if any
of you’ve been in my shoes, you’ll have some clues as to how to
change into a new pair, so to speak. (And thank you in advance,
Hanuman, for allowing this unorthodox question. I really appreciate
it!)
All the best,
Douglas Turet, G.J.,
Turet Design, LLC
P.O. Box 242
Avon, MA 02322-0242
Tel: (508) 586-5690
Fax: (508) 586-5677