[paula]

Jeremy: first, thank you for responding. Second, thank you for responding in a humorous and encouraging way. (I mean this sincerely.)

Now, I'll go have the vapours for awhile (pause while hysterics ensue)...

I'm back.

Okay. I wanted to get my bearings and you have definitely gotten me started on the path of figuring out whether there's any point in my trying to master this or whether I just pony up the dough for someone else to make the changes I want.

First I think you have confirmed what I had suspected, which is that there's nothing easy or intuitive about modifying the X-Cart templates. In point of fact, it demands a substantial investment in time and effort and a certain amount of technical knowledge. It's easy, perhaps, in the way that painting a wall is easy, once you've bought the plans, had the house built, had the interior finished, read a how-to book on interior painting, bought the paint and brushes and primer and tape, applied the primer and tape and are now dipping the paintbrush into the can of paint.

It appears that, before I can actually replace FFFBD3 with FFFFFF, I have to first figure out essentially the structure of the templated site. I have to go through "page by page" and determine what elements are on that page, and what images etc. are linked to that page, and what CSS has been applied. This is how I'm interpreting your advice - am I correct? I know there's "guidance" in the form of the list or tree on the debugging console, but I have to work through the tree for each "page" and interpret the names of templates, etc. right? Basically it's like downloading a site somone else built and figuring out every element of how they built it.

Also, before going any further, can you explain why I need a text editor and ftp client? I don't understand where that fits into all this. I did figure out that I can edit code in X-Cart. Are you copying code from X-Cart, pasting it into your editor, editing it and then replacing it in X-Cart? If so, why?

And why would I need to make a new class? I don't want to change the structure of pages at all, just the colors.

(Re: wysiwyg. I understand your point. But for my purposes now, all I'm concerned with is changing colors on this template. I didn't go into this intending to become an X-cart expert and, indeed, at the moment I'm contemplating running screaming in the opposite direction.)

I have to go meet some people so I won't be able to post anymore this evening, but if you could answer my questions re: the text editor and the classes, I'd really appreciate it. I will be letting all this percolate overnight and decide whether to post some additional specific questions, or just give the thing up.

Thanks again -