Baby Steps: Content (p2) Baby Steps: Content (p2) by Dour
STEP 3: A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
Lets add out site title (sans a banner, for now) and a small introduction. First, type your sites name. I'll use MY SIMS SITE. Next, lets bold the text a little so it will stand out next to less significant text. Highlight the title and press the thick B button located above the preview window.
You can see that, while it makes the title a little thicker it doesn't really help it stand out. So lets amp up the size a little by clicking a few times on the +a button.
That's better :) When you're happy with the size, SAVE
STEP 4: NAVIGATION
Let's say you're making a site to showcase the CC you've been making. Theoretically, all you need is to put your downloads there on that page, with your title. But Net-iquite says you should use index.html as a sort of introduction. Reserve it, not for the meat of the content on your site, but rather as a place to display site news (like the date of your most recent update). So, lets add a link to your downloads page. Beneath your title, type Downloads. Make it somewhere between the standard 12pt font and the extra huge font of the title. You also want this text to stand out.
But You see that "downloads" looks a little lonely, lets add a few more links to our navigation choices to help spice up the menu. I'm going to add LINKS which will be a place to store links to my favorite CC sites, as well as affiliates and family members. ABOUT will be a page I can devote to talking about myself, and possibly contain my terms on sharing and redistribution as well. Finally a GUESTBOOK so people can comment about the site. For now, those are pretty basic and standard pages for a small site. I'm also going to add a | in between each to make it look 'cooler', use your own discretion.
Now that we have our navigation layed out, lets go ahead an link these to appropriate (though nonexistant) pages. To link, simply highlight and click the button that says "link"
The result is this little box in which you type the address of the page you'll be linking to.
note: Webpages read file paths/locations the same as computers (duh). by default the "folder" that you're uploading to (called root) is simply /.There is no need to include the / in the path of files that are located in the root folder. So a link to downloads.html, if it is in root, should be simply typed downloads.html
If the file is located in a subfolder (as images frequently are) you will type the name of the folder, a / and the name of the file. example: images/mybanner.jpg
So for our download.html (which we have yet to create) located (in the future) in our root folder, just type download.html in the input field. Repeat using appropriate (lowercase only) names for your links, about, and guestbook links.
Now that everything is squared away and linked appropriatly, lets refine and add a little something to the page. First let's center the whole thing, it just makes it look so much nicer. To center, highlight everything you want centered (in this case, everything) and punch the little button at the top that looks like a bunch of lines staggered and centered.
There, that looks loads better already. To polish off this main page, lets add a small table, and put some text inside it to let visitors know that the site is brand new.
I personally don't like the idea of any text or content being larger than the banner. Something about me likes things compartmentalized instead of just splattered all over the page all messy-like. So, an alternative to what I'm telling you to do from this point until part 3 would be to just type.
But before we go any further... save :)
STEP 5: CONTENT
Lets add a table. Since my table is only going to be used for keeping visitors updated on the site, it will have only 1 column, but lets give it 3 rows. To insert a table, click the "table" icon, to give you this popup box.
Alright, so type in those numbers to give yourself a great looking table. 800 px is just a rough number, play around with that number till you're happy with it.
note: Always design your website to be easily viewed by people with min. 1024x768 resolution. There are still people bumbling around with 800x600 and good god, 640xwhatever but who cares about them, seriously. If they don't know how to change their resolution, or they don't have a monitor that supports 1024x768, not being able to fit all your text in their screen is the least of their problems. A good guideline is to keep the height of images below 650 and width somewhere below 1000.
When finished you should have something that looks akin to this.
Which means you're doing it right, and means that everyone is happy :)
In the first box, type the date, and possibly some sort of title for your "post".
In the second box, type whatever it is you want to say.
SAVE