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Archiver > Freepages-Help > 2003-01 > 1043973013


From: "Tilman Brandl" <>
Subject: Re: [FreeHelp] Web page design
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 01:30:13 +0100
References: <000b01c2c816$aa65cff0$ceef8690@pc>


Hi Fred,

> Do you guys actually think out a desired scheme for your
> page or does it just grow?

Yes. <bg>

Actually I had a few ideas as to what my site should look like, and also
how it should be organized. And then, while creating everything, it also
did change considerably. But maybe others have better ideas on this.

> So is there any recommended reading on page layout/design.

There are a few sites that may be helpful:
http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/wizards/webmasters.html
http://www.cyndislist.com/construc.htm#Plan
http://www.dsiegel.com/tips/index.html (more sophisticated stuff)
http://www.highfivearchive.com/core/index.html (for award winning
examples)

What I have also done is I loaded lots of gen-websites (into my tabbed
browser, MyIE2) and viewed them. Although many of them were also
inspiring, what I mainly learned from this journey was what I did *not*
want my site to look like ;-)

> Must I write material in the editor or can I copy /paste it
> from WORD etc or elsewhere.

Some people are indeed using word for creating their webpages. Meaning,
it can be done, and the pages can be saved away and uploaded directly as
html (at least from Word 97 and later). The problem with this often is
that a lot of proprietary MS code overhead is added to the pages, unless
you clean them up. This makes it pretty difficult to look at the code
for maintainance or in order to find possible quirks.

Copying text-only paragraphs from Word or any other texteditor into a
html- editor is a standard procedure. What I would like to strongly
discourage anybody from doing is copying complex and formatted material
from a Word-document into any html-editor, unless you make it strictly
text-only (which wouldn't save you the work of formatting etc. later, so
not much will be gained). Otherwise the results will be unpredictable,
and not satisfying.

> Can I copy/paste a table from EXCEL into the HTML editor.

Mhhh - not directly, you would see the data, but not in a table. 2
options here: (1) Save away an XL table or portion of '...as HTML', and
insert the *text* from that file into your code. (2) There's a freeware
utility that does that trick cleanly without putting any of the MS stuff
into your code (let me know if you want an url).

> I see I can make a table in Netscape Composer, could I copy
> this to another editor?

Basically you can copy *any* html code into the html-code of any page in
(probably) any editor. Must be done with great care though, in order not
to mix up or drop any tags.

> Could I assemble everything, text, graphics, images, tables
> etc in one WORD file then move it all into an editor for
> conversion to HTML?

See above - basically not advisable. But like I've said before, you can
create everything and then export/save it as html from inside Word.

Let us know, if you need more.

Good luck

Tilman

----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred Vines" <>
To: <>
Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2003 5:18 AM
Subject: [FreeHelp] Web page design


> I am tremulously ready to have a go at making a web page
> which I need
> for my surname DNA project, to report and discuss test
> results and their meaning to family genealogy. It will also
> require some pictures and graphs.
> Do you guys actually think out a desired scheme for your
> page or does it just grow?
> So is there any recommended reading on page layout/design.
>
> Must I write material in the editor or can I copy /paste it
> from WORD etc or elsewhere.
> Can I copy/paste a table from EXCEL into the HTML editor.
> I see I can make a table in Netscape Composer, could I copy
> this to another editor?
> Could I assemble everything, text, graphics, images, tables
> etc in one WORD file then move it all into an editor for
> conversion to HTML?
> Hopefully I'll cope with the tech side but where do I start?
> Fred Vines

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