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Notes on Web Design

These pages have been created with the minimum of financial and physical effort. If you have surfed on in and fancy a bash my notes explain how it all got set up.

You won't get far without web access although if you are reading this you will have solved problem one. I am using the connection at Calderdale College Halifax in the North of England. As a student I have free access and although the whole web system can go off-line for hours at a time it can be pretty quick. If you live near a largish town it could be worthwhile signing on for an evening or part time course that is free and offers web access. I cannot upload from the college so have a home account with thefreenet who are not free but cost about 30 pounds for 2 years. A real free service are x-stream, they have a big banner headline that pays for your service. Both x-stream and freenet offer local calls throughout the UK. Both slow up a lot at peak or even sensible times. I find early weekend mornings (before 9.30) give fastest access and keep the phone bills down.

Next you need an e-mail account so the results of later stages can be sent to you. None of the cheapskate accounts that I deal with offer e-mail; not even the college. Step forward the free providers; I use hotmail who do the job.

 

Step three is to get the web space. These pages are on geocities who put a banner on every page, you have to add the red logo to pages directly. Geocities give 11Mb of disk space, enough for a few hundred pages although pictures take up more space. Having signed up for geocities they e-mail the access password explaining the need to set up e-mail before the web space is set up. You have only got 2 weeks to start a web page or it gets turned off. So it makes sense to open the index page (set up be geocities) in the advanced html editor, type in few wise words and save the whole. The geocities passwords are almost impossible to remember but can be changed.

Web pages are linked files, the text part is in html, pictures are best as gifs or jpegs. You can put other picture types on the net but they take longer to put on line and may not be readable by other viewers. These pages were written in Word '97 and saved as html. Choosing view HTML source allows the code to be changed; this is handy for deleting odd bits that Word adds and for copying useful code from one page top another. Thus all pages can have a similar look by linking the same graphics onto all pages.

The pages have to be put onto geocities by uploading or copying. Copying is quicker and may be the only choice if your system does not support ftp. Go to geocities, log on and create a new html file. Keep this program running and open the new page's html code in notepad or Word. Select all, copy and paste into geocities. Pages can be replaced in the same manner, just delete the old text before pasting the new, you will eventually want to do this to the original index. All pages will have to be linked either to each other in a chain or some sort of tree accessed through index. There is plenty of help on geocities for this; if you are using Word a hyperlink can be inserted from the menu bar, view the page in html through Word to check that word has put in the right link. The referenced document must have exactly the same name as the page on geocities, Word likes htm rather than html and may link to a document on disk rather than the document on the web. Type in any changes. As a final check save the document and open it with explorer. This will show exactly what it looks like on screen without having to do any dialling in.

So far there will not be any graphics on geocities. A new page will look grey with empty boxes where the pictures should be. If you have ie4 geocities allows uploads. Any ie3 users need not fear, the latest ie4 versions are safe, they will not take over your desktop; upgrade. The geocities facility allows up to 20 files to be uploaded at once. The speed depends on how busy everyone is and how big the files are. it is best to upload a few files at a time so that if something goes wrong some files get through. You can abort part way through uploading with the risk of only part of a file going up; they look like old b/w television pictures, lots of lines and not much else. I have spent 20 minutes uploading files or under 1 minute. Much over 20 minutes and your system will time out. If the net is slow forget it and try again later. Try and shrink the files as much as possible before uploading. If you are scanning do so at 72 as that is all a screen will display. I have overdone the shrinking and ended up with very poor pictures. Black and white also saves some time over colour. Many pages can reference the same picture, this explains the same background and church picture on all these pages.

You will note that geocities addresses are definitely on the long side. These cannot be changed but we can cheat. I use come.to who provide a shorter address because you go to them and they re-direct the url to the real address. Provided the net is working the time delay is not noticeable. It is not as long as the time spent typing in the full url compared to www.come.to/stJames. They put yet another banner on top of your page as it loads to pay for the service but as with the geocities you can close them as they load. When getting your links put onto other pages it makes sense to use the full url not the virtual one. Then should anything happen to come.to all external links to your page will still work.

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