Broken links?

[zupkoff.laur]

I am currently using Microsoft Publisher 2003 to maintain a website
for a
student organization. Ever since I got the file from the previous
web
admin, I have had issues saving the web page; publisher is constantly
freezing when I try to save changes I have made. Publisher will
eventually unfreeze itself and correctly save changes to the
publisher
file itself, but now every time I tell it to publish to web,
Publisher
freezes at the step where the little window with the file folder
transferring files to the globe and whites out. I then have to close
and reopen the program, but after checking the site online, I see
that
the changes have still gone through to the site even though Publisher
froze. But the last time I tried to save updates I made to the page,
a bunch of the links on the index page suddenly stopped working and I
have no idea why. I didn't do anything to change any of these
hyperlinks but for some reason only three out of the nine that are on
the home page are working and the other six just go to an error page.
I cannot figure out why this is. Please help! I tried resaving and
republishing the site to the web thinking that might fix it and it
didn't. Thanks.
the web address is www.uwlax.edu/dsp

 

[DavidF]

First of all, be sure to make a backup copy of your file in case you haven't
done so already.

In looking at your site, all links are active on the home page, though I did
not follow them all. I will have a suggestion about this in a moment.

I suspect your biggest problem with closing the file and uploading your web
files probably has to do with the either the image sizes or possibly because
you have something straddling the page and the scratch area. Here are some
troubleshooting steps to take.

First of all if you are using a Master Page in your document, then don't.
This works fine in a print doc, but not a web doc. Go to View > Master Page.
If you have anything on the master page, move it to the main document page.
If it is blank, then move on to the next step.

Go to Tools > Options > Web tab and uncheck "Rely on VML..." and "Allow
PNG....".

Then you will want to compress the images and graphics. Reference: Compress
graphics file sizes to create smaller Publisher Web pages:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/publisher/HA011266301033.aspx
You have used a lot of very large images, and they themselves could be
creating the saving and uploading problems.

Now run the design checker under Tools to see if that spots any other
errors. This should spot any overlaps into the scratch area.

Now since you probably have the incremental upload option turned on, I would
suggest that you login to your web site space either by FTP or by way of the
control panel on your site, and I would delete the existing index.htm file
and the index_files folder. This will also delete that part of the files
that controls the incremental uploading function. It may also fix the issue
you are having with some of the links not seeming to work.

Now you are ready to upload fresh files. "Publish to the Web" and upload
your new files. Save your Publisher file and of course make a new backup
copy. Let me know if these steps solve your problems.

And when you have time, you should replace the bottom horizontal navbar with
a hand-built textual bar. For some reason when one uses the Publisher built
navbar, the vertical one will work in FireFox, but the bottom one is
converted into an image, and it kills the links. I can help you with this
after you get the primary issues settled.

DavidF