Web sites that won’t require much maintenance or updating are often built using straight HTML. Sometimes small components are written in Javascript, PHP or Flash to add a little flair or functionality in the site, but we’ll cover those a different time.
Editing the actual html pages of a web site requires an FTP connection to the actual site. (Just a little web trivia, HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and FTP is File Transfer Protocol. I know you always wanted to know.) That sounds a little technical, but there are a myraid of free FTP clients out there that are easily downloaded on any computer. I like FileZilla for my PC and CyberDuck for the Mac. Now, once you connect to a site via FTP, you can access all of the HTML pages.
Let’s look at Wine Down Main Street for example. The majority of the pages contain text that only needs to be updated once a year for the Wine Down Main Street event–which is a great one. Updating text in an HTML file isn’t difficult. Programs like TextMate make editing easier, by opening the document directly from the server in an editor with color-coded text and allowing users to make changes and save directly back to the server. Without a program like this, the file must be downloaded into a text editor, edited, saved and then uploaded to the server for the changes to take place.
Some pages are a little more difficult to edit because of how they are created. Tables used to be the standard to get content to stay in its place. Now style sheets tell content where to align on the page. Div tags have replaced table data cells. That is for another time though…Stay tuned!