Editing Your Published Website with MS Expression

This lesson will describe how to edit your website that has already been published with Microsoft Expression Web.

Start MS Expression Web

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Start MS Expression Web by double clicking on the desktop item or by going to your Start/Windows logo button, All Programs, Microsoft Expression Web, Microsoft Expression Web link.

Open Published Site

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To open your published site, go up to the "File" menu item and choose "Open Site".

Selecting Site to Open

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To open the site, type in the domain name of your site under the "Site Name" box. For our example, we’ll open a site called: http://www.feelbetternow-healthcare.com

Login To Website

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You will be prompted for a login and password. Type this in exactly as received and press the "Ok" button.

Choosing What To Edit

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Once you’ve logged in, you’ll see a list of files that are all part of your website. To edit a page, find the page in the list and double-click on it.
Your main page for the website is called "default.htm". This is the first page that visitors will see when browsing to your website.
The other pages that end with the extension ".dwt" are template files. There are pages on the site that are based off of the main templates and the .dwt files are those templates. This makes editing "standard" things on each page easier as you only need to edit the pages content and not have to worry about the layout and graphics. If you do want to make a major change, just edit the template file and that will rollout to the pages that are based off of the template.

Editing a Page

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In this example to edit a page, we’ll edit something on the "About Us" page and save the changes so that it’s visible on the website.
Double-click on the page that you want to edit. In our example we’ll edit the "about.htm" page.
1) The link in the upper right corner displays the template file that this page is based off of.
2) This is the "editable" area of the site. Outside of this, the mouse icon will change to a different icon showing that you cannot edit that area.

Making a Change to a Page

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Just like a normal desktop publishing program or word processor, edit or change the page however you would like. In our example, we’ll change the text from "insert content here" to "More About Us Coming Soon".

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Here’s what the changes to the page looks like.
Note the asterisk near the page name. This means that there has been a change to the page and you’ll need to save the changes to make them visible on the website.

Saving Your Page Changes

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To save the page, click on the "File" menu and choose "Save". This will save the changes that you have made to the page.
Since you are editing the files directly on your website, once you make the change and save it, it is now visible on your website immediately.

Page Has Been Saved

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Notice that after saving the page, the asterick is no longer there next to the page name. This is one way to confirm that the changes you have made are now saved to your website.
You can now close this page if you are done making changes.

Looking at Changes On Website through Internet Explorer

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Now, to see your changes, open up Internet Explorer or another browser.
Then go to your website by typing in the domain name and navigate to the page that was changed. Since we changed the "About Us" page, I clicked on the "About Us" button. It now shows us the About Us page. Notice that our changes that we made to it are reflected there.
If your changes are not shown, you might have to hit the "F5" button on your keyboard to refresh the page.
Once you see the changes on your page through Internet Explorer, it is live for all visitors to your site!

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