[paula]

Okay, separately from the tools needed to do the editing - I'm still completely confused. When I go into admin > edit templates I get a page that says "browse templates". Then there's the list at the top with skin1.css and buttons and today's news and a couple of others, and below there's a window with 2 columns full of folders. Are these 2 different groupings of the same templates? How many total templates are there? How many do I have to edit to accomplish my objective? Is there a flowchart anywhere that I can access that tells me how many "pages" theoretically are in the default site?

Am I reacting in an unusual way? Are there people who know exactly what to do and just sail in and make changes? Am I especially dense? I can't seem to get my bearings. There appears to be assumptions operative about what people should know coming into this thing and I clearly don't know things that are apparently obvious to others. What basics am I missing?

Here's what I know how to do: I could download an "unknown" html website into GoLive. In there I could open individual pages, and/or templates, and/or components. I could open the CSS File. Within all of those I could find where colors have been applied and change those colors. I could tell what's live text, what's a table cell and what's a graphic, and would know that if it's a graphic I would have to make changes in Photoshop. If I didn't want to have to mess around with resizing columns or table cells, etc., I would replace one graphic with a different graphic of the exact same size. That's the perspective I'm bringing to this.

Can I do that with an X-cart site? I went to the link you posted earlier about things to do in GoLive to keep it from screwing up the coding, which seemed helpful. Could I download the X-Cart site, and use my in and out links window to find all the linked templates? Do I just need to obtain passwords and settings, etc. to be able to connect to the server and access the site?

Since the site is dynamic would it not "download" as a series of pages and folders? Would it just be a collection of folders full of these individual templates? Like downloading a 100 components or something?

I haven't ever used a different text editor so I don't think I'm properly grasping what you're talking about when you talk about using the ftp client and text editor. Are you simply using a different tool than GoLive to connect to the server and access the pages?

Thanks again for your input and advice.