A Beginnger, Taking Over for a Beginner

[ProfProphet713]

I've read through a bunch of posts here on my first day, and while I am not a professional yet, I think I will hang around

 

I find myself in an odd predicament. I am a new partner in a consulting firm, and one of my side tasks is to completely overhaul the website. We hired a family friend to do a majority of the work, as she had "taken some classes".

 

To be frank, the demo she gave us was below par. The basic design was nice, but it just did not seem professional.

 

Turns out she did it all visually through Dreamweaver.

 

Is there a way I can go in, and without redoing the whole thing, improve with CSS, jquery, etc?

 

I don't have a lot of experience, but I am a quick learner. Just need to know if there is general strategy.

 

I have about a week to do this, so I can't do a whole lot.

 

Should I provide screen shots? Not sure to what this community responds best.

 

Thanks in advance!

[Andrea]

Screenshots won't help as we can't see what's under the hood. Ideally, we need a link or at least the code (that would be HTML and CSS). Without seeing the code, we can't answer your question, but in most cases, it's easier to just start over than it is to clean someone else's mess, especially for a beginner.

[falkencreative]

I agree with Andrea above -- how we answer your questions just depends on how the site is coded. If the code is really messy -- as often happens with a beginner's site where they are just using Dreamweaver's visual interface rather than the code -- it's often easier to start over from scratch than to try and improve what is there.

 

If you only have a week to improve this site and you have very little web coding knowledge, you would probably get significantly better results by hiring a web professional. If you want to do it yourself, I would suggest starting with the basics here: http://how-to-build-websites.com/