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Prepping Your Existing Site and Applying a DWT

These instructions will show you how to take a web site that does NOT use Dynamic Web Templates and prep it for use with DWTs, then applying a DWT. You are required to have FrontPage 2003+.

Once you are familiar with the general concepts, you may choose to do these steps in a different order which is more intuitive to you.

1. By now, you should have a subfolder with your DWT files inside your FrontPage web site. In the next few steps, we will "strip" the existing .htm pages of design elements, then attach the DWT to the pages.
    

   In this example, we have our original Business Synergy FrontPage web site. We want to convert it to use DWTs, and want to apply the Business Synergy DWTs. (Note that this example just happens to use a web site based on the Business Synergy look, as well as applying the Business Synergy DWTs. Your web site could be based on any design and the steps to prep would be about the same.)

   
   
2. Open one of the pages (in this example, the home page). Highlight the content area -- that is, anything that is NOT part of the underlying design. Right-click and choose "Copy."
    

   In this example, it was easiest to copy the content table (we will merge the tables later). We left the top bar, left column, and bottom border alone.

   
   
3. Hit Ctrl-A to select everything on the page, then hit Backspace to delete everything. Hit Ctrl-V to paste the content into the page.
    

   Ctrl-A

   Backspace

   Ctrl-V

   
   
4. If your content includes tables, follow these steps to get rid of the tables. Click inside a table, then go to Table > Convert > Table to Text. If you have additional sub-tables for layout, repeat the steps until you have no more tables. Your page should now be completely "stripped," with only content on the page. Please note that if you have "content tables" -- info boxes, form tables, etc., you should not convert them into text.
    
   
5. At this point, your web page is prepped! You may continue on and prep the rest of the pages in your web, or import your DWT folder (see instructions).
    
6. After importing your DWT files, attach your desired DWT. Go to Format > Dynamic Web Templates > Attach Dynamic Web Template. Choose the DWT you wish to attach. In this example, we are applying the splash page layout.
    
   
7. You will be prompted to assign Editable Regions for the existing content.
    

   	Double-click the "(body)" region.
   	Drop-down to "body1" so that all of the content will be dropped into the body1 region. Click OK, then OK again.

   
   
8. Click the "close" prompt.
    
   
9. You should see the layout apply. All of the old content should be within the "body1" region.
    
   
10. Cut and paste (or drag and drop) content that you need to go into other regions.
     
    
11. This page is done. Repeat the stripping and attaching process for all your other pages until all the pages in your web site have a DWT attached. Also delete any extraneous include pages.