The move to the new server has proved difficult. Besides the monetary savings, NEXX had stated that additional features were available. They failed to mention the loss of features, such as that any subsites (as our Member Area was defined) may no longer contain ASP (Active Server Pages) content. One method of correcting this would require embedding our former subsite within the main NPMA site. Attempting to do so revealed problems that have been brewing for some time. Our original site was written 5+ years ago using "Microsoft FrontPage 2003". FrontPage was a full-member of the Office family and Microsoft's premium editor for websites. In the 5 years since then, FrontPage has acquired a very bad reputation, mainly due to it's lack of following emerging standards for website development. In 2006 Microsoft discontinued upgrades to FrontPage, and in January 2007 they discontinued the product entirely. Their new product "Microsoft Expression Web" was written from the ground up to be fully adherent to all standards, and to compete with the most popular web tools of today (such as Adobe DreamWeaver). Reviews, such as at PC magazine, have heralded Expression Web as akin to, and possibly better than, the competition.
The quandary we face is that Expression Web kicks out all of our old webpages with multiple errors. Most are generated by FrontPage's use of "Shared Borders" (Google that if you want to hear some complaining!)
Rather than spend a great deal of time tweaking the old code to function, and end up with a website prone to errors at the slightest change, we're going to revamp the website. FrontPage "Shared Borders" are out in place of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which are the modern standard and much more flexible. A basic "News" page should be up by 8-27 for posting of timely information regarding the NPMA. New forum software is planned and will hopefully be running VERY soon.