I made a site a few years back for a trainer of mine, she wants to be able to update the site herself, so I suggested VSD would be the way to go as she has no experience of html or any other web building software. I would recreate the site in VSD, she would have a copy of vsd at her end, so what would I need to send her to be able to open the site at her end?

You would have to send her the .vnu file that VSD creates. And she has to send it back to you after she has made alterations/updates.

Actually, I believe once you make any changes and upload the files a new vnu file will be created in your backups folder on the web server. Both parties could access the newest vnu by simply downloading it from backups using an ftp program (CoffeeCup Direct FTP would work nicely)
Any changes uploaded would then create a newer vnu in Backups folder and so on......
Just have to keep an eye on deleting the older vnu files from the backups folder once they are no longer needed.
Hope this helps.

Does that really work? It seems to me that when you send her the VNU file, when she opens it she will get a lot of blank bloxes where files/images that were on the originating computer no longer exist on her computer.

If she adds any images, the VNU file will link to them on her computer and then when janet gets the VNU back SHE will be seeing blank boxes.

I wish there was a simple fix for this, I would love to be able to work on my websites from multiple computers, even it it meant keeping the VSD software on a USB flash drive. But at present you cannot do that.

I think your right, so I guess the only way it might work is to download the whole website along with the newest vnu......make changes and upload the site again which creates a newer vnu again. Everything needed should be there.

@Richard.. second the down load site from server.
And each person follow the lead on files... Like where the images go and so forth..
It would only take a few minutes with a decent connection for most sites.

Thanks for the help so far, what if I send a zip of the files folder, that has all the images in, wouldn't that work?

Actually, thinking about it, wouldn't a re-synch do it?

Janet,

You may need to get an answer direct from CoffeeCup, but I do not think a re-sync will do anything about the missing files. The VNU file will be looking on the computer for the files located in the same relative location as the original VNU had them.

So if you have your images located at c:\documents\mysite\images and the other person had the website located at c:\documents and settings\users\owner\mysite\images things would be in the same relative location.

Regarding downloading from the server;
Tried that, it does not work unless you have deleted all of the same .vnu files from the coffee cup directory. In other works, CoffeeCup VSD cannot have any memory of the VNU file or it will load the one on-drive before it loads the correct one from the site.

You almost have to wipe-out the whole directory and download it all again from the server. I have not been successful at this yet, but still trying.