Idiot-Proof Spry Bar Help

Ok, I need some serious help on my website. I’ve been working on it for a few weeks, and new problems come up daily. The thing is, I need all the instructions to be completely idiot proof. I’m just a kid trying to figure out Dreamweaver for the first time ever, and know limited lingo. If anyone who is patient enough to help me would be able to give me any tips at all, or refer me to someone they think can help, I’d really really really really appreciate it.

 The problem as of late, is my Spry Bar showing up in bullet points instead of in horizontal format in my HTML files. The first problem I had was my SSI. I think I fixed that, but I'm not sure. I had the index as an SHTML saved, and it auto updated all the other SHTML's, as it should. But then all the HTML's weren't updated, so I could not update the files to the Internet, because they were not saved as SHTML's, which leads me to explain that I know there are more than one ways to solve my problem. My SHTML's are working beautifully, but I don't know how to upload them to the website whilst replacing the HTMLS that are not auto-updating to the website. If you know how to do that, then we can just skip the whole Spry Bar Formatting thing, and just update the whole website to SHTML format. The thing  is, some of my links (Like this one  www.theanimalpark.com/groombath.shtml ) ARE going to SHTML format, but in the top left hand corner it reads "[ an error occurred while processing this directive]", and the images won't show up properly.

 Another odd tidbit, last night I went to bed with all the HTML's saved, and not updated. They were missing a section in the sprybar that the SHTML's had. When I woke up this morning, all the HTML's were updated with the missing section there, but now all the pages are in bullet form. Any of you have experience with the HTML fairy? I have no idea what happened with that.

 Any way, I want to thank you so much for the help in advance. Literrally every little bit helps.

Hi Welcome to Sitepoint :slight_smile:

Unfortunately your question seems directly related to software (Dreamweaver) and most of the coders here do not use (or like) that package as most code by hand. You may get more help in a specific Dreamweaver Forum as they will be familiar with that software.

We can help with specific html and css issues but things like how Dreamweaver maintains its includes and spry menu is software specific and we don’t have many DW experts around I’m afraid.

Last time I checked, Dreamweaver and Expert were mutually exclusive terms.

As to the problem at hand – spry and wysiwyg. In other words, how NOT to build a website. Do yourself a favor, pitch dreamweaver and ANYTHING it recommends doing in the trash, and learn to do things properly. I don’t even want to know what the devil that zipcode meta is even for (since nothing uses it), how that overstuffed keywords meta is supposed to help the page work (anything more than 8-10 words and 80 bytes being pointless bloat)… and that’s before we’re even out of the HEAD.

The 14 validation errors reflecting this. The further down the code I scroll, the worse it gets – paragraphs on what should be headings, tables for layout, inlined style on static elements… EVERY reason that the only thing you can learn from Dreamweaver is how NOT to build a website! Much like Fireworks or the rest of the Adobe suite, the only thing about them which can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting their use.