Taken ownership of dreamweaver site with Templates and having issues

Thanks for the great suggestions. I will be giving these a try today and see if any of them will help. 

I'll post back with results today. 

it happens sometimes (frequently) that the Templates system disengages. If you encounter strange behavior from child pages that do not refresh when the Template page is updated, try reapplying the template to the child pages.
To do this, open the Assets panel, and drag and drop the template onto the child document (in split view mode) on the display window

To add to what Jon said, upload modified child pages to server and refresh your browser to see changes.

Proprietary DW Templates are OK for small sites (20-40 pages).  But personally, I prefer server-side technologies like includes (SSIs) because they're faster and more efficient than DW Templates.

https://alt-web.blogspot.com/2015/07/server-side-includes-with-php.html

Post back if you have more questions.

Dreamweaver's .DWT Template system is "local only" they don't do anything on the server, and unless being shared between developers, shouldn't be uploaded at all. 

1. You have to modify the .DWT file from within a Defined Site inside Dreamweaver. This is extremely important as without a Defined Site, DW won't know what to do with the .DWT Template file or any Child page created from it.

2. When saved within a Defined Site, DW will propagate the changes to any local Child pages made from the .DWT.

3. Once complete, you will then need to upload every changed Child page to the server, replacing the old ones.