OK, so this may be a "duh-ism," but I have a question. (I don't even know what to search for to look this one up in the forums, so I hope someone can point me in the right direction! ) One of the websites I manage (for a local art club) needs updating of content (not design) at least once a month, sometimes more often. I have been doing updates just in my CoffeeCup HTML editor, and uploading whatever page file(s) I change. With doing the site design in Site Designer V3, do I have to do the content updates in that and export the changes every time, re-uploading everything? Or is there a way to open the affected pages in my HTML editor, make the changes to the appropriate page(s), and just upload those? Basically all I usually need to do is update text (calendar listings, event details, etc.) and/or change event photos out. I'd like a simple way to do that, rather than reinventing the entire wheel (or site, in this case) every time. Any advice? Thanks in advance!

You can update anything locally or in any HTML editor that Site Designer produces when exported

BUT

If you update anything outside of your SD3 project then it becomes immediately out of date which then requires you to do the changes. within Site Designer again at some point so it is up to date for the next time you need export it, (if ever you do of course)

If you don't think you will ever need to change the design then that's ok, but even a small tweak to the design without it being up to date and you forget to bring it up to date before exporting, will over-write the site, causing you great headaches & work.

As long as the text or the image count and or size doesn't change you can easily make the changes with the Html Editor.
If you design with some of this in mind you can make sure the layout will look good with an increase or decrease of text count.
If you need to make actual site layout changes you can then update your text and images when you open your site in SD.

What you see is what you get: Site DESIGNER and not: Site MANAGER.
You will run into problems if you, like many others, try to manage a fairly large website through Site Designer V3.
So if you still wish to manage your Site Designer based website through SD V3 you better limit the the number of website pages to the minimum.

Off the record:
Seems to me that it should not be too difficult and time consuming for CoffeeCup to expand Site Designer V3 with some basic Site Management functionality for text only, if they choose to go in that direction.

I would add the concept of variable content placeholders, each with a unique ID related to page number and sequence - within page - number.
The export function would have to detect changed content placeholders and regenerate / upload only those webpages containing changed text.

They were working on a feature to address dynamic content but I haven't seen any info about it in a long time.

Actually, that is a very good question, Andrea. I had the same one a while ago.
The problem I saw myself confronted with, was that I wanted to change my pictures on my website regularly, without having to change, build and deploy the website repeatedly.

We need to be aware that creating a responsive website is not the same as creating a dynamic website. When working with Site Designer, we are always dealing with predefined, static content.
Therefore, SD is currently not the tool to tackle these kinds of problems easily.

But while I like working with SD, I've decided to program a solution to the problem myself.
Please, take a look at the result at www.sikkes.de/ . (Okay, the site is not perfect yet, but I’m getting closer…) All the images you see are dynamically loaded into the page. For this I had to write PHP, JS and CSS. The only thing I have to do now to change the content is to upload new images to my webspace or delete old images.
Henny is right when he says SD is a designer tool, not a site management tool. If we want more than a static site, SD combined with the chosen framework will only give us a head start.

One alternative is to use surreal cms
https://www.surrealcms.com

You can easily change pictures and text...
BUT... your original Site Designer file will still be as it was 1st uploaded... So you would still need to update that if you ever wanted to re-upload... So if that's cool surreal comes in handy.

It's not free but you can put 5 urls on one account...
I do not get compensated from them... Just sharing an easy way to make changes
MJ

I think a simple compromise regarding the orginal request may be the following -
(a) exporting the Site Designer project to the hard drive, and keeping it there;
(b) making the local hard-drive export a 'website project' in The HTML Editor;
(c) doing all edits in Site Designer, and exporting only to the hard drive, which is quick;
(d) uploading from the 'website project' only those files that have been affected by the edit in Site Designer.

With the above, the website and the SD project are kept in line, but one is spared the problem of uploading a whole website to the web host with what is often a somewhat limited upload speed (I get well over 200 Mbs download speed, but only a little over 20 Mbs upload speed).

Frank

I always export to my HDD, and then I use DFTP to upload. I can choose which files I want to upload. In many cases it is just a page file or two, some images and the main css file.