Part 4: How to create your own web site

How to create your own web site - Part 4

Brought to you by The Phoenix On-Line Foundation and Slippy...AKA...Ian

Well from what I've seen you all seem to be getting the hang of this html stuff, and you certainly seem to be handling the angelfire basic page editor. Some of you have been real adventurous and even included sounds.

For this part I'm going to cover a few other tags that some of ya might not have found, and point you to some very good help materials. But first to cover a few of the problems I've been hearing about.

COLOR!!

One question I was asked was about changing the color of the links. The enthusiastic young web builder concerned was using another tag we haven't seen yet & that's the tag. This tag can apply to the color, size and type of text being displayed and works the same way as the tag to control the text size & formatting. There are a range of colors available to include black, red, blue, yellow etc.. the syntax of the tag would be..
 to change to red, but other colors could be used.
Similarly you can use the tag to change the text size instead of the <h> tag. Here you would use to set a font size of 3.. the difference here is that the size numbers are the reverse of those used on the <h> tag that means 1 is the smallest not the biggest. Yet another of the tags is to actually change the font itself, using the tag. so you might use something like..

Now you can use all these together in one "font" command so to set a black text of size 4 you might use....

like all the tags you use to reset the text to the default.
NOW these tags apply to the actual TEXT in the page.. "Links" are set in different way. There's are THREE different colors for the links, one is the color of unvisited links, another is that of the active link, and the last is the colour of a link you have used. These colors are set at the start of the page, and can only be changed using the color chart provided in the basic editor... that is unless you adventure toward the advanced editor, but a word of warning!! once you change your page to use the advanced editor you can NOT change it back! Once logged into angelfire you will note a range of links set the left of the screen the basic html guide and the hints & tips on web building are very good and easy to follow guides for learning more.

For the more inquisitive among you, I'm going to give a brief outline of how the actual html on a page is set out.. an easy way of peeking is run your browser and load your own home page.. now right click over the page (not on a picture) and select the "view source" option. You will now get a page opened in notepad that shows all the codes for your homepage... it will look a little different from the area of text you entered!! Any html document must first declare itself as html and it does this by having <html> at the top... likewise at the end you will have </html> to say that the html has now finished. ALL your html programming is between these two tags.

The first section you meet is the header information, this sets up all the defaults and the page name etc.. it can also provide information used by search engines. the header information sits within the <head> & </head> tags. Here you will see the <title> tags and <body> tags which set the default colour, size and style of your text. It also sets up the background color. Then comes the area where the displayed information, text & pictures all go.. that's called the "body text" and is within the <body> & </body> tags.

If you feel adventurous and want to try your own work, free from the restrictions of the basic editor, I would suggest you create a new page and use the advanced editor on that rather than risk the excellent work you already have. There are a few cheats you can use to help!! (heheh aren't there always!!) How I work is to view the source of a page format I like, then copy and past the header information to my new page! That way you can be sure of consistency in color, size etc.. all that remains then is to fill in the body text.. Copy/paste is an excellent and quick way of getting links & image tags onto a page.. just change the target URL and your away!!

html is such a broad area, we have only covered a sample of what's available.. but enough to get ya going. Next time I hope to look at frames.. but that WILL involve you using the advanced editor. Make use of the good guides available and please feel free to ask if ya have any problems or questions.

SO what now!!! isn't it now time to launch out into the big wide world and publish!!! There are a range of ways to get people to ya site! Easiest is just tell people ya meet and give then your page address. You could also put the address in your icq info, in your personal info in comic chat and any other forum where homepage URL's are available. You can also get friends to put links from their homepage to yours, and the other way around.. it was in this way that I went to a super site for us soppy romantics from MsBoots new homepage. Lastly you can register with a search engine. Most make a charge but some are free.. you should find a link at angelfire to a FREE search engine registration.. a word of warning first though!!.. You will need some extra work before you register.. to include some keywords that the describe your site and that the engine can use.

One last tool that ANY webpage builder might like.. and that's use of the "web_garage" linked from angelfire, it will run a check on your homepage and provide you with a report on the page.. including load times, browser compatibility, spelling, etc etc..

Good luck!!!.. keep at it.. I'd love to see more of the sites so mail me ya homepage addy!

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