I have been offered an \"opportunity\" to take over maintenance of a small inter

Question

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".

Explanation / Answer

Beware of the Iceberg Syndrome!

With an iceberg, the vast majority of it is located under the water, with just a small percentage being visible. Likewise with a website, the vast majority of it is hidden out of view from the user.

Changing the site from nested tables to CSS/DIV's will take a considerable amount of time and effort, none of which will be visible to the users and managers. If you spend a month working on this change, to your managers it will look as if you have done nothing at all for the month. This could be very bad for your career, especially if you are new to the company.

I would take on the role of maintaining the site and continue to keep it up-to-date, while making small changes here and there to tidy up the architecture of the site, but I wouldn't waste too much time on it.

If it works, don't fix it.

You will almost certainly make some small mistakes somewhere, be it a typo or a DIV that doesn't quite align correctly. These are the only parts of your effort that anyone is going to see, and they are going to have a negative impact on their perception of the site, and therefore yourself. You could end up doing more harm than good to your career.

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