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Make a plan. Planning is important before taking any action. First look at your pages and note what changes you want to make.
I have a huge file containing over 7,800 article web pages set up with Google Adsense code and a Google search box. I don’t use Adsense and want to put Yahoo ads on them. You might have a similar situation with pages on a web server that need to be changed to different ad codes.
My pages all have a tiresome orange banner at the top and I want to change that and match the title line and ad text to a new banner color.
I want to replace the Google Adsense code with Yahoo Publisher code.
To begin I will copy one folder of article web pages from my large 7,800 article page file. These 30+ pages I will work on and then FTP them to a file on my server. If you already have pages on a server, you will need to FTP a copy of them to your computer. This shouldn’t remove them from “online” until you copy your changed files over them or actually delete them from the server. If you have 7,800 pages on your server, it will be easiest to work with them a section at a time. They are probably broken up into keyword sections; so just take one keyword file at a time until you have done the operation on all of them. So far I have converted 174 pages in Dreamweaver in one session. I don’t know if it will handle more than that at once. My recommendation is to break up your work into 50 to 100 page portions. Your computer might have enough power to let you do more pages. That can be your experiment to try after you see how to do this. So far Dreamweaver is the only page editor that does this job so quickly and well.
Line up your tools. For this task you will need to use FTP. I use Cute FTP Pro. The free version should be fine for this job and you can download it HERE. If you don’t know how to use FTP, you must learn this to make your life easier. The trickiest part of using FTP software is getting the username and password set up. Once you get it to connect right to your hosting account, it stays set up every time you open it and is very easy to use by drag and drop or copy and paste. You can drag a whole file or just a few pages. So get an FTP software and learn how to use it.
To edit the color of my banner and get the Hex number for matching text, I use Photoshop Elements. You need an image editor that can enhance the hue. I just load the image into Photoshop, click on enhance color and slide a lever button to get the color I want. It did a nice job of converting orange into cherry red. I then used the dropper tool to fine out what the Hex color number is for the banner color I selected. That’s the color I’ll use for the header font and detail on my pages. You don’t need to convert colors at all if your goal is only to get the ad codes switched. It’s just so easy that you might want to try it. In my file there is only one banner that serves as header for 174 pages. Free image editing software is GIMP and Serif’s PhotoPlus 6.0 Maybe it’s a woman thing, but I love to work with the colors on my pages and there’s a neat Color Schemer here. Edit any images you wish before running the HTML edit process. If you will be changing the name of an image file, that will be an addtional run of the process to find and replace the image names.
Go now to your ad company and get a copy of each ad code you will be putting into your pages. Make sure you get the code for the correct size ad for each one you will be replacing. Mark the size down next to the code if it’s not evident in the code itself. Paste this into a notepad where it’s handy on your desktop.
I will be using one 728x90, one 250x250 square and I need to get a search box. My ads come from Yahoo and they don’t have an ad-related search box; so I’ll just use a plain Yahoo search box to fill that space. Alternatively, any 468x60 banner ad code can be used to replace a Google search box. You would replace the code for the Google search box with the banner HTML code for your banner.
The final tool needed for this task is Dreamweaver. There may be other tools out there, but I could not find another that will handle this large number of pages and the complex code we will be switching around. You can get a trial version of Dreamweaver from Adobe HERE. I think the number of pages you can load into Dreamweaver at one time might depend on how much memory your computer has and how many other things you have running.
Important:
 Plan your job by looking at the pages (index and article – both design and source code) to see what needs to be changed. If you want to change colors, this procedure will change every instance of a given color and you can’t change it just one place.
Line up your tools: pages ready in a folder, Dreamweaver open and ready, ad codes on a notepad.
Save your work frequently
Double-check every step to make sure you have the right code in the right section of the “find and replace” tool.
Review the pages before you FTP them back to your web host. Sometimes there will be a missed ad code. The index page might be set up differently from the rest. This is easy to fix with another quick run of the software.
Now you are ready. CLICK HERE to view the video and see how fast and easy this job can be done. This is a large video; so please let the browser sit a few minutes to load it.
After you watch it through fast once, run it while you do your editing and pause it where you need to with the pause button at the lower left corner. The slider can be used to find a certain part.
Find and replace a few times and the Google is gone!
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