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BOOTLOG
002 13/09/05
BUILDING
A WEBSITE, part 2
Now that
you have a firm idea of the structure of your web site you can start to collect
together all of the material -- documents, images and so on -- that you want to
appear on the pages.
Begin by
creating a new folder on your C: drive and call it ‘Mysite1’, or something
similar. The easiest way to do that is in Windows Explorer, highlight the C:
drive icon then on the File menu go to New > Folder and with the new folder
displayed and highlighted, type in the new name and press Return.
The next
job is to create some empty sub-folders in your Mysite1 folder, to hold all of
your documents and images -- the method is the same, double click the Mysite 1
icon then use File > New > Folder to create and name as many empty
folders as you need.
You can
now copy and paste your prepared document files into their new homes in the
relevant Mysite1 folder subfolder(s). Don’t forget to spell check everything,
there’s nothing more annoying than spotting a mistake on a ‘published’ web page
and having to go back and change it.
This is
also a good opportunity to compose any other small blocks of text that you
might need, your contact details for example, plus picture captions etc. Take
it from me it is much easier to compose text beforehand using your word
processor, rather than try to write and edit text blocks on an actual web page.
If you try to write more than a few words on a web page you will probably find
that boxes and frames keep resizing themselves, throwing your layout off-bonk.
Your
images, particularly if they were shot on a digital camera will almost
certainly need a bit of work because they will probably be much too large to
fit comfortably on to a web page. You can re-size them on the page but this
involves extra work and the actual files will still be quite big and take
longer to load when the page is displayed and you know how annoying that can
be.
The best
way to reduce the size of an image file is to compress it (in JPEG format)
using an image-editing program, and then save the resized file in the
appropriate Mysite1 image sub-folder.
I use
PaintShop Pro and the file compression utility is on the SaveAs menu (under
Options) but freeware editors like Microsoft Picture Editor, Irfanview and
Picasa (see Software), also do an excellent job. The actual techniques are
described in Boot Camp 372.
I would
aim for an image size of around 20 to 40kb, the smaller the better but check
each re-sized image to make sure that the higher compression hasn’t robbed the
picture of too much detail or messed around with the colours. This job can take
a while but I promise you that having everything properly organised in one
folder will save a lot of time and effort later on.
part 3 --
Registering your domain
Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
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