I was cruising around the xsitepro forum and noticed a poor fellow had gotten himself in a pickle.

He had hired a friend, who was a website designer, to build a website for him. He had a very nice site, but before they could wrap things up the web designer died. So….this guy was looking for a way to rebuild and/or edit his website.

He was concerned because his friend was a mac user and used his mac to build the site. He thought he would have to purchase a mac to edit his website.

He wanted to use Xsitepro, and felt it would be easier to manage his site. But the existing site would have to be converted into an Xsitepro template. One of the guys, named Websight (knows his stuff) commented that the conversion shouldn’t be a problem. The only problem I see is finding someone to take his new existing site and convert it into Xsitepro.

I had some other ideas, trying to say this poor fellow some cash. See what you think?

Hi Peter…..really nice looking site. Sorry to hear about your friend, hope he knows what you do

Looks like a job for version 2.0, and as usual websight1 really knows the capabilities of xsite and I’ve come to respect his advice.

A couple of things to consider.

First, I don’t think it matters that your friend used a Mac to build your site. Maybe someone knows more than me, but I wouldn’t let that bother you at this point.

Second, Do you have access to your server? If you do, you might want to consider doing a backup of your entire site. It could save you one big headache in the future. Also, you can use the Get and Put feature in Dreamweaver and get the site to your local computer, and do any necessary edits until you can make a decision on whether or not you want to reproduce the site using Xsite.

Third, there is a free program called HTTrack that will allow you to download the entire site to your hard drive. I would consider doing this even if you make a backup. You can then use Dreamweaver to work on the files that were downloaded with HTTrack which will allow you to maintain your website until you decide what to do.

I use Httrack for a variety of purposes. It’s perfect for grabbing anyones site for the purpose of learning how to do something or recreate a feature that is new to you.

http://www.httrack.com/

Fourth, As long as you own the domain and have access to the server you could install a wordpress blog. Posting weekly or so about the various projects you’re doing, having a category about customers, guitar types, various other products……does wonders for search engine spiders and ranking. If you choose this option you could leave the existing site and put your blog in a new directory http://www.cornerstoneguitar.com/blog but I would use a name that is more relative to the content of the site like http://www.cornerstoneguitar.com/customguitars

Hope that helps a little.

Good luck Brother

Scott