Frontpage

Hi,

I started a whole new adventure for myself yesterday. I decided I would attempt to create a webpage on my ISP. Things just got to where the fear of uploading had to be addressed. As usual, a lot of bump & grind and I did it. Crude......yes! .....but, hey, it has to start somewhere doesn't it?

I created a simple webcam pic of myself on a simple yellow background with some simple text and 2 GIFs on each side of my pic. Basically, had I have so much as gotten a background up there for starters, I would have been ecstatic.

Please be patient with me. This is a whole new thing for me completely. Okay, so the site looks good from my PC but I then went to one of my daughters' PCs last night to show her how to do it. (we love to learn together as a family) and it looked terrible from her PC. Spacing, centering, name it. She runs 1024 resolution vs. my 1152. Both 19" monitors. ??????

My ISP support had different ideas every time I called, depending on who I spoke with.

I published mine with cuteFTP, from my the "My Webs" folder to the site, after saving it there of course.

Mandy & I then tried to do the same thing from her PC with a simple layout. I believe there might be something corrupt with her installation of Frontpage because when we went to save the page, the background & pic in hers never got to her "My Webs" folder. We also noticed that "Publish Web" was never highlighted as an option in her "File" menu. No big deal. I will reinstall today some time.

Okay, I try not to get into writing a Novella every tiime I start a thread but it looks like here comes another one. Sorry about this but I like to be clear with my issues for you all.

Back to my tech advisors, ......everyone had different ideas on where the background and pic in hers should come from. ....... "browse for" & "don't browse for ". Stuff like that. "Place pic and background in "My Webs" before designing & don't do that. Mixed signals everywhere. Use FTP from within frontpage and don't use........you get the picture.

So, among all these brilliant minds on this wonderful forum, can you give me some help????

(1) Anyone know of a site(s) that come(s) down to my level in this with respect to do's and do nots? I looked for grade 1 but could only find grade 6 wherever I went.

(2) Could you please take a look at my website and tell me if everything is symmetrical? If it isn't for any of you, could you "view source" and tell me why not in some cases? HTML is not in my vocabulary at all. I just know what it looks like and can kind of spot where my stuff is in it. That's all.

Hopefully you will be able to see my site. If so, cover your faces for fear of your monitor screens cracking.

http://members.shaw.ca/loaded4bear/

If you people don't mind, can I please learn some of the basics from all of you here? I know I can buy books but even if I did, they don't have a personal touch like you do. I don't want to become a webmaster at your expense & time. Not at all, but is anyone interested at all in putting up with me on this for a liitle while? Please?????

Randy (aka: Homer)

 

Randy, you've made a great start. All you need now is basic understanding of how HTML translates into what you see on the monitor.
Different systems, monitors, resolutions, et al, will display everything quite different from what you think, especially using a WYSIWYG editor like front page.
The most common mistake is to space everything using tabs and spaces, and have every distance measured between objects as a static size. If you use tables, and have everything dynamically sized, it then looks (more or less) the same on all monitors, resolutions, and even browser choices (Netscape, IE, Mozilla, et al).
If you'll allow me, I am going to redesign the page, using tables, to show you what I mean.
It's now 9:15 am GMT-8 so give me about 15 minutes, and then check at: http://members.shaw.ca/reboot/temp/loaded4bear.htm
You can simply click on View, Source, and save it somewhere on your hard drive to play with further. You can then compare the HTML from mine to yours, and see how it works.
Notice I have eliminated a background picture, and substituted the same color. Saves space and download time. Also notice there are no more spaces, I use breaks to move stuff around. Some cells are centered, others are right or left justified, play with them to see how it differs. I also added a mailto link to the send email gif.
Hope this helps

 

Right On!

Thanks a million, reboot!

Thanks for taking up your time to redesign my page!

Okay, so I obviously have a lot to learn about HTML if I want to continue this endeavor. I shall get into it if that's what it takes.

Question: I took the contents of your page design, in notepad, and then copy/pasted it into my original index.html file, replacing what was there. (I did save it, though, for comparison purposes) So then I uploaded the new file via ftp to shaw. Thing is, my page looks the same. It doesn't look like yours. What did I do wrong?

Also what really good is Frontpage then or is there a way of working the program using tables, as you mentioned? If so, how do I do that within the program?

Please reply

It just freaks me out how someone would actually take the time to do this for me! You have no idea how much I appreciate this!

 

No problem it's too easy in FPX to do simple stuff like this.
Anyhow...
Don't copy/paste my HTML into yours, open notepad, and open the one you saved from my site, select Edit, select all, then hit CTRL+C. Open Frontpage, and hit CTRL+V, save it, and exit.
Now upload the new one.
It's also possible that your browser did NOT refresh the page once you uploaded it, so you can't see the changes.
Try again, this time hold down the SHIFT key and hit the Refresh button (or F5).
Just checked, it's my HTML up there, but the links to the pictures seem to have gone bad. I had to rename two of them, the Pict0001.JPG is renamed to Pict0001.jpg (lowercase .jpg) and Email Note.gif is renamed to EmailNote.gif (no space).
Go back in your FTP program, and rename them on the site.

Frontpage is as good as any WYSIWYG editor. Everyone has a preference though, and some prefer (me included) hand coding in notepad, though for a quick page like yours FPX or whatever works just as well.

For Tables...Open FP, click on Table, Insert Table, make it as many columns wide as you want, and as many rows long as you need. For your page, I made it 3 columns wide, and 5 or 6 deep. Each "cell" can hold different information, even parts of a picture to make up a whole. You can color each cell differently, have it left, right, or centered, do whatever you want in each cell, and not affect the look of the rest of the page.
Just for fun, I did some messing with your page. Take a look at: http://members.shaw.ca/reboot/temp/loaded4bear2.htm to see just some examples of what you can do.

 

Wild!

reboot,

What can I say besides that, to me, it's just wild what's really going on with web design! Thank you so very much for creating the page with all the notes in it as to what can be done.

I went into my ftp and tried editing notepad without success so I just renamed the jpg and the gif so that they would match what was referred to in notepad. It works fine now. Thanx again.

Well, this has been a very humbling experience for me, indeed!

I have a whole different way of looking at people who are good at designing pages now. Boy, do I ever!

Now I shall spend a great deal of time taking the instructional page you made me & dissecting it for days on end. I shall study it like you wouldn't believe!

Okay, to finish off, one last thing! Anyone here want to recommend a certain HTML book that would suffice for me for now. Obviously a "for dummies" one appears to be in order. Seriously though, any recommendations after having read this thread and kind of catching on to where I'm at?

Humbly,
Randy

 

The best book is notepad, and your brain.
Go check out www.arachnophilia.com for their WYSIWYG editor (it's free).
The help files in Front page, and the other arachn... will tell you more than any book you don't need.