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I have been offered an "opportunity" to take over maintenance of a small internal website run by my group that provides information about schedules and photos of events the groups done.

My manager sent me the link to the site and I checked it out. The site looked clean and neat but loaded in ~5 seconds. I thought this was a little long considering the site really didn't contain a lot of content. This prompted me to take a look under the hood at the pages source code. To my horror it'd been totally hacked together using nested tables!

I'm new so I really can't say no to this "opportunity" so what should I do with it?

Every fiber of my being feels that the only correct thing to do is over hall the site using CSS, Div's, Span's and any other appropriate tags that a sane/good web developer would used to begin with instead of depending on the render incentive magic of tables.

But I'd like to ask programmers with more experienced then me, who have been in this situation. What should I do?

Is my only realistic option to leave the horror as is and only adjusting the content as requested? I'm really torn between good development and the corporate reality I'm part of. Is there some kind of middle ground where things can be made better even if they're not perfect?

Thanks ahead of time.

Edit:

I've been looking into this a little deeper and noticed an extension type that rendered as HTML but was actually ".cfm". After looking into it I found out this was a ColdFusion file. Which is apparently an Adobe WYSIWIG program which must have been used by my predecessor to create this site.

This means maintenance will be trivial once I get a copy of ColdFusion. I will probably still need to do things like create thumb nails and move some of the content on the home page elsewhere to improve load times. I doubt I can go much further in optimizing the site past this without throwing out ColdFusion.

I am very grateful for all the good advice and will keep it in mind for future "Opportunities".

I have been offered an "opportunity" to take over maintenance of a small internal website run by my group that provides information about schedules and photos of events the groups done.

My manager sent me the link to the site and I checked it out. The site looked clean and neat but loaded in ~5 seconds. I thought this was a little long considering the site really didn't contain a lot of content. This prompted me to take a look under the hood at the pages source code. To my horror it'd been totally hacked together using nested tables!

I'm new so I really can't say no to this "opportunity" so what should I do with it?

Every fiber of my being feels that the only correct thing to do is overhaul the site using CSS, Div's, Span's and any other appropriate tags that a sane/good web developer would used to begin with instead of depending on the render incentive magic of tables.

But I'd like to ask programmers with more experienced then me, who have been in this situation. What should I do?

Is my only realistic option to leave the horror as is and only adjusting the content as requested? I'm really torn between good development and the corporate reality I'm part of. Is there some kind of middle ground where things can be made better even if they're not perfect?

Thanks ahead of time.

Edit:

I've been looking into this a little deeper and noticed an extension type that rendered as HTML but was actually ".cfm". After looking into it I found out this was a ColdFusion file. Which is apparently an Adobe WYSIWIG program which must have been used by my predecessor to create this site.

This means maintenance will be trivial once I get a copy of ColdFusion. I will probably still need to do things like create thumb nails and move some of the content on the home page elsewhere to improve load times. I doubt I can go much further in optimizing the site past this without throwing out ColdFusion.

I am very grateful for all the good advice and will keep it in mind for future "Opportunities".

I have been offered an "opportunity" to take over maintenance of a small internal website run by my group that provides information about schedules and photos of events the groups done.

My manager sent me the link to the site and checked it out. The site looked clean and neat but loaded in ~5 seconds. I thought this was a little long considering the site really didn't contain a lot of content. This prompted me to take a look under the hood at the pages source code. To my horror it'd been totally hacked together using nested tables!

I'm new so I really can't say no to this "opportunity" so what should I do with it?

Every fiber of my being feels that the only correct thing to do is over hall the site using CSS, Div's, Span's and any other appropriate tags that a sane/good web developer would used to begin with instead of depending on the render incentive magic of tables.

But I'd like to ask programmers with more experienced then me, who have been in this situation. What should I do?

Is my only realistic option to leave the horror as is and only adjusting the content as requested? I'm really torn between good development and the corporate reality I'm part of. Is there some kind of middle ground where things can be made better even if they're not perfect?

Thanks ahead of time.

I have been offered an "opportunity" to take over maintenance of a small internal website run by my group that provides information about schedules and photos of events the groups done.

My manager sent me the link to the site and I checked it out. The site looked clean and neat but loaded in ~5 seconds. I thought this was a little long considering the site really didn't contain a lot of content. This prompted me to take a look under the hood at the pages source code. To my horror it'd been totally hacked together using nested tables!

I'm new so I really can't say no to this "opportunity" so what should I do with it?

Every fiber of my being feels that the only correct thing to do is over hall the site using CSS, Div's, Span's and any other appropriate tags that a sane/good web developer would used to begin with instead of depending on the render incentive magic of tables.

But I'd like to ask programmers with more experienced then me, who have been in this situation. What should I do?

Is my only realistic option to leave the horror as is and only adjusting the content as requested? I'm really torn between good development and the corporate reality I'm part of. Is there some kind of middle ground where things can be made better even if they're not perfect?

Thanks ahead of time.

Edit:

I've been looking into this a little deeper and noticed an extension type that rendered as HTML but was actually ".cfm". After looking into it I found out this was a ColdFusion file. Which is apparently an Adobe WYSIWIG program which must have been used by my predecessor to create this site.

This means maintenance will be trivial once I get a copy of ColdFusion. I will probably still need to do things like create thumb nails and move some of the content on the home page elsewhere to improve load times. I doubt I can go much further in optimizing the site past this without throwing out ColdFusion.

I am very grateful for all the good advice and will keep it in mind for future "Opportunities".