I developed a website through Microsoft Publisher. It was a very tedious task, but it has been up and running for a while. I would like to switch to anther web design program and have heard great things about VSD, so I downloaded a trial copy to check it out. I'm wondering if there is an easier way to convert the elements of my old website (or bunches of it) to the new one, rather than doing it one object/picture at a time. (Most of the items are .png files right now.) The website, btw, is freerangeguppies.com. Suggestions?

Hiya freerange..

Unfortunately the way to go will not be VSD for you unless you plan to just remake the site in VSD. VSD doesn't allow for importing of website files as it stores all of it's settings in a specific file that ends in .vnu which is the format for the program. Basically all your files for your website are saved into that file and when you edit it again that's the file it opens. It will extract the files for you and upload them to your site for you so you don't have to mess with that part, but you cannot edit the extracted files yourself and still go back to VSD to edit them more as it won't have those edited files in it's setup.

I hope that made sense. Many of the programs you'll find have this similar setup such as Shopping Cart Creator, Designer etc. They have their own form of file saving and the files they save are the only ones that they will open to reedit so you need to actually start from scratch when using VSD.

I'm not sure if Publisher's files are code based and would be editable using the HTML Editor or not, I've not opened any Publisher site pages to check that, but you could check that if you like. That would allow you to alter it using the code setup instead of the visual setup if you're able to do that.

Otherwise the only option open when using VSD is to start from scratch and just try to copy your site manually which shouldn't be too hard to do either as it's done so much visually that as long as you have the images you need, backgrounds and color settings, you should be all set. Text is just a copy and paste thing directly from your current site so that's pretty easy to do to. Guess it's all in how you want it to work

P.S. Regardless of which way you decide to go, I would suggest you convert your images (well most of them that don't need transparency) to the .jpg format for size and many times quality issues as .png files are huge compared to .jpg and load much slower.

Thanks. I am a total beginner, and am just hoping to find something that is NOT a huge time suck. I don't know code (and dont have the time to learn it), so I think I really need a WSIWYG program. I will see how hard it is to convert to VSD manually. Thanks again.

Hi
Publisher generates XML code when you ask it to pulish to the web so VSD would be no good.
It is interesting though on my PC setup if I select web page preview in publisher then select file I can see a drop down menu option edit with coffee cup editor. I can then see the xml code in the editor.

Since Publisher is a MS product, maybe it will be possible to convert it into Expression Web, which is also from MS. This is just a guass, though...