One of my visitors told me that he wanted to move his website, which was designed with Dreamweaver CC, to BlueGriffon, and asked if it could be done without having to redo the site all over again. This article shows you the way.
My visitor was spurred to change web editors because he had read about Adobe's (the company that develops Dreamweaver) move some time ago to terminate the subscriptions of everyone in Venezuela. Since Dreamweaver can currently only be obtained and used as part of a subscription plan (ie, by paying a fee every month), everyone in that country who depended on it to update their site would have been abruptly left high and dry, with little or no notice.
Although he did not live in that country (and Adobe's decision has since been reversed), it made him realise how precarious his situation was, depending on software that he may suddenly be unable to use, even though it was already installed on his computer. (This is, of course, one of the problems with subscription-based software. You not only have to keep paying every month to use it, but you also depend on the company to keep supplying those services to you.)
However, before you switch to BlueGriffon, you need to be aware of a few things.
BlueGriffon does not support Dreamweaver's DWT template system. You can edit all your existing pages, create new ones, and so on, but the editor has no equivalent where you can change the design of your site in the template, and have it automatically replicated throughout your site.
BlueGriffon does not have an integrated file upload manager that can track the pages that you have modified, and publish only those that have changed. You can install a plugin that will allow you to publish your pages from within BlueGriffon, but you will still have to remember yourself which pages you have modified and select them for uploading. That said, unless you suffer from amnesia between the time you change the page and upload it, this is generally not a big deal, and it's just a few seconds (or less) of extra work to select the files to publish.
In my opinion, BlueGriffon is less polished than either Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web (a free web editor for Windows). Be prepared for a bit of clumsiness in the user interface here and there, and minor irritations that may not be significant enough to hamper you.
On the plus side, it is free, and even open source. You don't have to pay for it at all, let alone keep paying a monthly fee just to continue to use it. And you most certainly do not have create your website from scratch. You can continue where you left off.
Apart from the considerations mentioned above, there is really little else you need to do to "transfer" your site from Dreamweaver to BlueGriffon. In fact, there is no "transfer" involved.
All you need to do is to use BlueGriffon to open whichever web page on your computer that you want to update, and edit it as you please. Both Dreamweaver and BlueGriffon are visual HTML editors. They are designed to create and edit HTML (and CSS) files. Such files follow the HTML/CSS standards so that they can be edited in any HTML editor. As such, it doesn't matter to BlueGriffon (or Dreamweaver for that matter) that some other editor was used to create a particular file before. These web editors, like all web browsers, are interchangeable.
For those who need a more systematic list of steps to take, instead of a vague "open the web page in BlueGriffon", do the following.
Install BlueGriffon. If you need help on this, see the "Download and install" section of the BlueGriffon Tutorial.
Locate your local website folder. This is the folder on the computer where you saved your website files in Dreamweaver. (There's no point asking me where you saved the files. Try looking in your Documents folder, if you have truly no idea, since that was the default location suggested by earlier versions of Dreamweaver.)
Start BlueGriffon. Click "File" from the menu, and "Open File" from the drop down menu that appears. Navigate to the local website folder you found in the above step. Click the relevant file once to select it. Then click the "Open" button.
Your web page should now appear in BlueGriffon, allowing you to update it as you see fit. If you are not sure how to use BlueGriffon for a particular task, take a look at the index of all BlueGriffon tutorials, and read the relevant article or chapter. If you are just changing some words, just click to put your text cursor at the place you want to change, and use the backspace (or delete) key to remove whatever you want to get rid of, and type as per normal. Yes, BlueGriffon works just like Dreamweaver (and for that matter, most editors and word processors) in that respect.
When you are through with your changes, save your work by clicking "File" from the menu, followed by "Save" from the drop-down menu that appears.
Then publish the page to your site. See How to Publish (Upload) Your Website with BlueGriffon if you need help with this.
Copyright © 2019 Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
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