Tech: website design for beginners?

Subject: website design for beginners?
From: Catrin
Date: 09 Dec 00 - 05:59 PM

Hi everyone!

The reason Dave and I purchased this computer, together with internet access, scanner etc. is because he is a self emplyed mural artist who needs to get modern and get himself a website.

I am the computer literate(ish) one of the household and said I will do the website for him. People keep telling me how easy it is but (daft I know) I am scared of actually going ahead and doing it so have been putting it off.

I am a complete novice as far as websites are concerned and I wonder if anyone would mind giving me a few tips on where to start.

I have the follwing questions:-

a) Is there a free website place that would allow me to set up a site with about seven or eight pages which have about twenty or so photos between them?

b) Where do I actually start? I have been told that all I need to do is design pages in word, and then save them as HTML - is this really true?

c) Any other tips that people might care to give would be very much appreciated.

Yours hopefully and with intrepidation.

Catrin

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 09 Dec 00 - 06:12 PM

Catrin,

Who is your ISP? You probably already have free web space.

I take it you have a PC and are running Windows. You may well have Front Page Express already installed on your computer. This will give you a visual envrionment to start working on your web pages and will be better than using Word. It is not perfect by any means but it should give you a start. I am no Web Page desiger but for what I do, I use a combination of Front Page Express and a good old text editor.

Jon

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Catrin
Date: 09 Dec 00 - 06:20 PM

Hi Jon,

Our ISP at the moment is world on line - but we're changing back to BT at the end of Dec (because of crappy service and high costs)

Yeah - I do have front page express! I'm in the process of scanning photos of Dave's work into the pc at the moment.....

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 09 Dec 00 - 06:42 PM

OK Catrin,

The WorldOnline deal does (or did whe I signed up with Screaming) offer free web space with aother compay, Tripod which I would guess you could keep after you leave WorldOnline. You could get your own free deal with Tripod ayway but their service involves pop up windows with adverts.

I moved from WorldOnLine because they became too expensive but I kept my phone with them. This means that I can still use my old account at a cost of 1p per minute. I am now with RedHotAnt who have yet to prove that they can offer a consitently reliable service.

I couldn't afford BT as I think they only offer off peak unmetered access but they were the first ISP I used and I could not fault them over reliability. The BT deals I have just looked at inlclude 10Mb of web space and I am pretty certain will not have irritating ads to put people off your site.

My own feeling is that if you are changing over, that you would be better off not putting anything on the internet until you are with BT.

One point with graphics, cut them down to a suitable size and have them in something like a jpeg format. You can resize graphics with Front Page Express but all you are doing is chaging the visual size, e.g. if you resized an A4 graphic down to the size of a postage stamp, the A4 graphic is downloaded are resized. This has a bad effect on download speed and also is a waste of webspace.

Jon

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Catrin
Date: 09 Dec 00 - 06:45 PM

Thanks Jon!

We're changing over on 30th Dec so the new year does seem like a good time to put up a new website. I can be working on it 'til then.....

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: katlaughing
Date: 09 Dec 00 - 09:30 PM

Catrin, I have done a couple of Tripod, which Jon mentions, one using their templates, which anyone can do, savvy or no; and the other, very simple, from scratch.

I also have a couple of other simples ones from scratch. There are sites which specifically cater to artists. You might PM Alice in Montana, as she is a graphics artist with lots of experience in marketing on the web and has some beuatiful webpages of her own design.

I am pretty good at the "stoopid simple" questions **BG**, so if you get stuck on one of them, give me a holler, we can get on ICQ and work through it.

Just jump in there and start going at it; it gets easier as you go along. HTML is easy once you know the codes; they are always the same for whatever effect you want, so the only catch is to be sure you put them in exactly correct each time.

Good luck, gyrlfriend!

kat

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Peter K (Fionn)
Date: 09 Dec 00 - 09:42 PM

And Catrin, don't feel you need to start from scratch. Find a website you like, that's maybe doing the same kind of job as you want yours to do, and save it. You can then edit it to your heart's content - change the text, change the pictures, change the links, change the colours - change it till there's nothing left of the original, if you like. When you're starting out, you'll find that this approach is a good bit easier than starting from an empty space.

The more simple you can keep it, the less space you'll use, the easier it will be to download, and - increasingly important - it's got a better chance of running on other platforms and in other browsers. (The Mudcat itself is a fine example of simplicity that really works.)

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: katlaughing
Date: 09 Dec 00 - 10:18 PM

Good point, Fionn. To do that Catrin, just right click on a site you like, choose View Source, then copy the entire code that comes up and paste it into whatever program you use for editing. That is how I did my first one, which I never finished (did something else altogether.)

kat

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 09 Dec 00 - 10:37 PM

Yes Fionn, simplicity or perhaps more importantly, compatibility rules (at least IMO it does). Have you ever read Gick Gaughan's Rant BTW? I think it is a great read.

Jon

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: SeanM
Date: 09 Dec 00 - 10:47 PM

Yahoo is a halfway decent free server, especially since they just upped the memory cap to 25 meg.

If you're going to make a habit out of doing this, I can't stress enough how much happier life is with something along the lines of Dreamweaver or Front Page. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors as a whole make building web pages VERY simple, and those two are probably the best - also moderately cheap (for web pro software, that is) at around $150-$200, cheaper for used copies of the earlier editions.

"Simple" is something everyone else has mentioned, but it's important enough to KEEP mentioning. One of the worst things you can do to a web page is to overload the first page or two with graphics. It's a REALLY good idea to try and keep the first page load time to under 45 seconds on a 56k modem... current wisdom says that that's about the absolute limit that most people will wait for a page they aren't already familiar with, and 56k is becoming universal (heck, I'm waiting for my DSL to be reconnected, and found out that NetZero, the free ISP, is providing at 56).

Check the resources out there, too. You'll find TONS of conflicting advice, much of it centered around the form/function battle (Should your webpage be a tool for customers to use, or an ad for customers to view? This, and more questions, on Internet Tonight).

Good luck, though.

M

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Catrin
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 04:16 AM

Oooooh - thank you thank you everyone - we're rushing out now but I've just read everybody's meessages and i cant stress enough how useful all of this is. I will be check in later to respond more fully.

See, I can do some HTML already (taught by mudcat!!!)

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Roger in Sheffield
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 05:20 AM

How about putting HTML in the filter box, setting the age box to 2 yrs and hitting refresh for lots of threads
here is one
If you don't want to pay for web hosting is it possible to use the freespace of several providers?
I have about 4 free ISP connections ( with free webspace) on this computer, so I am guessing I could host the main webpage (with picture thumbnails) on one and have the larger picture files on the others and link them from the thumbnails if anyone wanted to see a larger picture?
Anyway if your whole webpage including the picture files will fit in your free webspace you won't have a problem. Then you just have to upload the site (cute ftp free trial or other) to your webspace and advertise the site, hope someone here can explain metatags and the like so that search engines get you listed
Preview it here first, via a HTML practice thread, Catrin so I can have a look at how it should be done

Roger

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Roger in Sheffield
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 05:43 AM

getting back to your original questions Catrin
You can have more than eight pages in your webspace so long as the total size of all the files (inc.picture files)does not exceed the total webspace you have been allocated. Most free webspace seems to be around 10 meg so exceeding that wouldn't be likely unless you had lots of large pictures on your site. Do you have some photo editing software to reduce the definion of your scans for screen/web viewing - that way they take up less space & download faster. Can you use thumbnails of the pictures and link them to larger pictures, that way your first page will appear quickly and any more detail can be clicked on by a link if the viewer chooses to

Good luck
Roger

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Bernard
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 05:44 AM

Hi, Catrin!

My website is on Freeserve. I decided to keep it simple, so the file sizes are small (and load quicker!).

Freeserve only give you 15Mb, and I'm using about 12.5Mb at the moment.

I started in Word, but found that it had a habit of altering things - definitely not WYSIWYG!

So now I do it entirely inside Notepad - purely text. Your skills are already good enough for that.

As far as uploading is comcerned, I use Terrapin FTP, which is very user-friendly.

Email me if you want any more info, meanwhile take a look at my website (non-frames), and a 'frames' website I did for a friend.

Visit my Website

Visit Galafield's Website

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Bernard
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 05:53 AM

Forgot to mention!

The difference between Freeserve and some other so-called free webspace (e.g. Fortune City) is your pages remain unchanged - no advertising banners, etc. Something to watch out for!

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Roger in Sheffield
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 06:34 AM

Thanks Bernard I was going to mention that I use Notepad and view in Explorer
Save the original file as text, then save again using 'save as' but this time delete the .txt from the filename and replace with .html and change 'save as type'to all files
This should save your file with an "e" symbol, just click it to open your html document, if it looks like it should Hurray, more often than not it don't
this way you can play around off line makin pages - just remember to delete the real bad ones otherwise you will end up with loads of oddly named pages cluttering up 'my documents'

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From:
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 07:21 AM

Hi Caitrin, I am not in the UK, but one of the things you might want to look at is some of the magazines with Cover CDs. You definitely can get started with Notepad/Explorer and a book like Ian Graham's book on HTML.

Once you get beyond a certain point you might want to get something more graphics oriented. You can get some good bargains by purchasing some of the magazines with a Cover CD. I've gotten Xara-3D, Livesite-2 and Hotdog Pro 5.5 as well as a number of other major software packages with an orientation on Web-page design. Look at PC-Pro, PC-Plus, PC-Format as well as other more specifically. I don't remember any of their names right now.

I personally use the Geocities/Yahoo Free Web-page system. They offer 15 Megs on their free system. I'm only using about 12%, but then I don't use a lot of graphics.

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Mary in Kentucky
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 09:03 AM

Hi Catrin,

I hope these suggestions aren't too simple/obvious. I had to learn them on my own because I didn't have anyone to ask. I even spent a year asking everyone I knew how to make a midi file! They all replied that they knew nothing about it!

1) Understand that there is a difference between making an HTML file which can be viewed on your computer, and "publishing" one to the web which can viewed by all. Use an FTP program (I use FTP__pro the light version because it's free.) Your ISP will tell you where to send the files. The main page is always named index.html. I recommend naming all the files .html and keeping all the names in lower case. You can get fancy with putting files in folders and organizing them, but if there aren't too many, they can all be in the root directory.

2) When you're using Notepad, save as somename.html and be sure to change the drop down box to "all files" when saving.

3) Go ahead and delete all you old versions so you won't have soooooooo many cluttering up your space.

4) Jon mentioned Front Page Express which you probably already have. Use it to get a great first skeleton page and then delete unnecessay code if you wish. I think it saves as .htm files so be careful and consistent here.

5) Learn HTML so you can make changes easily and understand what's going on.

6) Probably go ahead and learn tables so you can space stuff.

7) There are millions of links for learning HTML. I like the stuff at about.com and for tables I like http://www.pagetutor.com/pagetutor/tables/

8) Find a page you like (preferably somthing simple), view/source the code (it will open in Notepad), copy and save it. Then you can make changes to it to suit your page. Remember to change it back to an HTML file later.

9) Don't waste a lot of time floundering. PM me or another mudcatter if you get stuck.

Good luck.

Mary

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 09:15 AM

Catrin. I doubt that you would be using Marquee on your web site but that is an IE spefic tag and it does not scroll on other browsers - I would guess that as it is non-standard, it doesn't even have to display at all.

This leads me to another point. When you test your web site, at a minimum, test it on IE and Netscape as the results could be quite different. Compatibility has been mentioned but remember that not everyone uses the "big 2". I for example, have just switched from using IE as my main browser to using Opera which, incidentally, seems to me to be far more efficient than the other browsers I have used.

Jon

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Mary in Kentucky
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 10:09 AM

oops...that FTP client should be WS_FTP LE.

Also, as far as the marquee, I've used it in the past just for fun, mostly to send special messages to a favorite uncle who reads my pages. I assumed that even if people didn't have IE, they could see the words. I wonder if the words in the marquee (because mine was at the top of a page)help in search engine listings? My listing seemed to jump up in the rankings considerably when I used certain words...may have just been coincidence or timing though. That reminds me Catrin, if you're doing marketing you may want to use a page counter (you can get invisible ones) and pay attention to your meta tags. I'd also suggest that you don't put your page on the web until you get the meta tags like you want them. It seems that some search engines don't update very often and your page could be listed incorrectly for months.

Which also reminds me of a very bad experience I had. An unscrupulous company left my resume posted for nearly a year after I repeatedly requested that it be removed. So once something gets "out there" it's hard to ever remove it.

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From:
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 10:18 AM

Mary in Kentucky, I agree with you on using tables. With tables you can get precise, or nearly display placement.

That Pagetutor page looks really good. Here's a clickable link for those who want it.

Page Tutor

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From:
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 10:42 AM

Here's a link to several pages on Free Web Page Hosting

About Free Web Page Hosting

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: GUEST,Liam's Brother
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 12:26 PM

Hi!

I found free hosting space with commercials at Netscape. Take a look at the webpages I set up for Bob Conroy and myself at...

Dan Milner & Bob Conroy

Click on "Create Your Own Page" at the top. It was time consuming but not difficult.

All the best,
Dan

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: GUEST,Liam's Brother
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 12:28 PM

Now that was supposed to read WITHOUT COMMERCIALS!

Catrin, how on earth did you get the headline chorus line above?

All the best,
Dan

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Jeri
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 12:50 PM

Dan, she typed the following:

<h1><big><strong>bold><i><font color =red><marquee> See, I can do some HTML already (taught by mudcat!!!)

The operative thingie is: <marquee>type in the text you want [but you should close with] </marquee>

The problem is, this is non-standard HTML, and won't work on some browsers - Netscape, for example.

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 12:56 PM

Dan, nice site but I really think you could do with taking a look at the size of some of the images you are using.

I have just cut the "Simon Bolivar" from a 136K 491x318 gif to a 16k 300x194 (the size you are actually displaying) jpeg which I think would display just as well. If we assume that the same could be done on all the images on your ships page, that would make a tremendous difference to download time.

Jon

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Snuffy
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 01:49 PM

MARQUEE only works on IE, and BLINK (guess what that does!) only works on Netscape, so if you combine the two tags you will have some sort of effect for 90+% of users.

<MARQUEE><BLINK>Put Your Text Here</BLINK></MARQUEE>

Wassail! V

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Catrin
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 02:32 PM

Hi everybody - I am reading this and am completely overwhelemed by the response!!!

So many messages in twenty four hours!!

I would like to answer everyone individually but time does not allow for that at the moment. I will print this thread out in the next day or so and go through the advice carefully and slowly. I already feel as if I know loads more about web pages than I did at this time yesterday.

Isn't mudcat wonderful!

Cheers,

Catrin

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Penny S.
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 04:26 PM

Just when I needed all this information. How very synchronous! Does anyone know if providers of webspace have any regulations about content, such as civic issues which might be seen as contentious in some way? (Mildly so, but of the taking issue with someone else's website content type.)

Penny

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: GUEST,Liam's Brother
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 05:27 PM

Thanks for the marquee and photo pointers. I'm going to try the marquee now. Top is Snuffy's way...

Madre Mia! It works!

Next is Jeri's way...

bold>Madre Mia! It works!

All the best,
Dan

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: GUEST,Liam's Brother
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 05:28 PM

Thanks. Just needs a little fine tuning.

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: GUEST,chrisflapjack
Date: 10 Dec 00 - 06:24 PM

hi folks you can put a website on aol, as a member, as part of the aol deal.

or freeserve, for free.

or lineone, for free.

the easiest program to use I know of is Adobe Pagemill.

Dreamweaver 3 is even better, but professional, and a bit complicated.

Front Page I can't handle, all sorts of snags.

I have done a couple of websites for friends who are in business, for fun - it's not hard, I'm thinking of taking it up to make some easy money -- good luck

chris

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From:
Date: 11 Dec 00 - 12:45 AM

Penny, most of the Web-Hosting or ISP's don't have a lot of rules regarding content, with two major caveats.

1 - Don't promote any sort of ILLEGAL activity

2 - No Pornography.

Assuming you avoid those things, the sky's the limit.

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Haruo
Date: 11 Dec 00 - 02:06 AM

My home page is on SCN (Seattle Community Network), entirely free and no ads, but only 1Mb (!) and relatively hard to load stuff onto; for more space I use GeoCities (now a part of Yahoo), but the drawback there is that if a viewer is using (as MMario apparently does) a computer with an educational filter designed to keep kids from doing porn at school (I guess) they won't be able to access it, because somebody thinks free=dirty ?? I set up a second GeoCities site for my online hymnal, because all those MIDIs can get kind of Mb-heavy.

Liland

PS Most of my site is in Esperanto, but the little red-cross flags (English, as opposed to British) are designed to guide anglophones to legible parts. Geocities comes with annoying little ads in the upper right corner of most pages (in most cases I design it so the only thing obscured thereby is the English flag, which most of my presumably Esperantophone visitors don't need anyway...).

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Haruo
Date: 11 Dec 00 - 02:16 AM

Oopsy-daisy, somehow I left the end of my main Geocities URL off. Try this.

Liland

PS The background tune is Aloha 'Oe, not a folk tune (composed by Liliuokalani).

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Peter T.
Date: 11 Dec 00 - 10:54 AM

Catrin,
apart from the SIMPLICITY advice, no one has said much about design. A few simple things you might consider that will make your pages look more professional:

1) As has been said, page 1 is the most critical page, and should tell people about who you are and your taste as soon as they open it. It should be a portal to the rest of your site, and should be very fast-loading;
2) You should consider designing the whole site: like a special edition of a magazine. For instance, you should find a font and a colour and perhaps a design logo that you like, and stick with it throughout. You should repeat your logo on each page -- it helps to hold the site together visually. There are important visual things about font types, serifs, etc, that you might want to check out a design manual on -- virtually everything in any standard print design manual is important for the Web. No clutter, ease of reading.
3) Remember that on each page you need to ensure that the reader can click back to the first home page. This is just Internet manners. You don't want them to have to go backwards using the browser. It is also good manners to provide Other Links to other sites of possible interest. It shows that you are not selfish.
4) Check out your page on someone else's machine when it is up. There are all kinds of things that may happen in terms of margins, colour, etc., that your machine may smuggle in without your knowing it. This is less prevalent than it was, but still happens.
5) It was mentioned above that you can steal stuff from other sites, but it wasn't completely clear how you do this. Keep in mind that not only can you save the printed stuff on any Web page, you can save the whole Web page (check out your Web browser) complete with all of its hidden HTML coding. Then you can muck around with it all you like. This is how most of us stole stuff in the beginning.

yours, Peter T.

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Peter K (Fionn)
Date: 11 Dec 00 - 02:07 PM

Glad to see Opera getting a favourable mention Jon - it's simple, it works, and I'd like to think it's the future. Does Mosaic still exist?

Good points Peter T - I realised as soon as I'd posted that I sould have explained how to copy site coding. But by the time the gremlins let me back into the Cafe, Kat had taken care of it.

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 11 Dec 00 - 06:16 PM

Fionn, I visited the NCSA web site and the Mosiac page was last uptated in Jan '97. It seems that the page is just kept for historical purposes. As for existing, I wonder how many browsers were based on the Mosiac one.

As for Opera, there was a thread in the help forum recently where John in Brisbane and BillD indicated they liked it so there are probably a handful of us in Mudcat who are using it. I am not sure about the future but Opera should be good enough to at least make MS and Netscape re-think there ideas about producing non-standard bloatware - who knows?

Maybe Netscape already have, I gather Netscape 6 is a completely new design but I have yet to try it and haven't done any reading about it.

Jon

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Burke
Date: 11 Dec 00 - 09:33 PM

It's been a long time since I got my basic HTML training, but I found some style guide type information really useful. I'm going to add some things to Peter's advice above.

HTML is a way of marking text that in origin had more to do with content than actualy display. Try to keep that in mind. You'll mark something as a head 1 or 2, but it's the user's browser that actually decides how big that is based on the user's settings. One setting I can set is for the browser to always use my choice of fonts & colors instead of accepting the page author's. I've used it more in the past, but I've found some pages unreadable because authors did strange things with backgrounds and crazy contrasts that were just lost.

In addition to checking your page with different browsers change the browser window sizes & other settings, you never know what your readers have set.

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Penny S.
Date: 12 Dec 00 - 06:05 PM

George, thank you for that. I wasn't actually thinking illegal or porn - but what I need to work on would contain a major disagreement with a local campaigning group.

Does anyone know what the letters RN, in caps superscript, mean beside a web site name? I did a search the other day and saw it beside the name of a group I was looking for.

And with the free suppliers, does one have to use their software, or could I set up my design on anything and then upload it?

Penny

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 12 Dec 00 - 06:22 PM

Penny, HTML is HTML so you should be able to set up your design on anything. Some WebSpace providers such as Tripod do provide their own on-line design tools but I am not aware of any that don't provide a method of uploading your own files. Similarly Tripod, for example, provides it's own system for uploading files but also alows normal FTP transfer.

One pitfall I do remember someone in Mudcat commenting on that Windows is case insensitive, and allows certain characters that Unix does not allow. Unix (or perhaps operating systems are case sensitve and your Web space provider may well be using this operating system. The safest bet is too stick with Alpha-numeric characters and the underscore character (not a space) and to be consistent with capitalisation on your page names and hyperlinks. That way, you should have something that is guaranteed to upload and you won't have the frustration of going back to check links.

Jon

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: NightWing
Date: 12 Dec 00 - 06:40 PM

Penny,

Give a link to the place you saw it. I've never seen it before, but guess it might be something like a "Registered Trademark" symbol or something *shrug*

Like this? ®

BB,
NightWing

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Roger in Sheffield
Date: 24 Dec 00 - 10:30 AM

how is it going Catrin? - can we have a peek yet?

Subject: RE: Help: website design for beginners?
From: Den
Date: 24 Dec 00 - 12:53 PM

Someone mentioned Dreamweaver somewhere up there and I would highly recommend it. I am a Graphic Designer by profession and don't know much about HTML so I was thrilled to find a programme like Dreamweaver which works almost like a page layout programme. You can use what they call layers to place text and pics in any way you design your page and then when you finish with a couple of clicks you can convert your entire layout into tables and then view your pages in your browser.

Another programme I would recommend is Photoshop version 6 which comes bundled with an incredible programme called Image Ready. This little programme allows you to decrease the size of your graphics files to virtually nothing with no real visable difference in quality. You can display your images in side by side windows. The original in one and the enhanced in the other then set up a default modem speed (I usually set it for 28.8 modems) and then change the colour range from say 256 down to 50 or less and the programme will give your image a new size and tell you how long it will take the image to download using a 28.8 modem. For instance I used an original image which was a little less than a meg in size and would have taken 15 minutes to download, not a good idea. When I used Image Ready to decrease the colours etc I got the image down to 7k with a 2 second download time with no real visable difference in quality.

I recently attended a seminar on website development and apparently there was a study done to determine how websites are viewed. They came to the conclusion that pages are usually viewed starting at the top left and then the eye moved to the centre and then down the page to the bottom right. They recommended you place your logo, or your company name, or your site identification on the top left of the page with graphics, pics etc, optically centred. Menu items were mostly place top centre and action buttons placed on the left. The right side of the page was usually used for least important info. I hope this is helpful. I didn't know anything about website development until I started using the programmes I mentioned earlier and doing very little research and now I'm developing the local Library's site which consists of 14 branches and all of their promotional information. Its a monster project but I'm doing it with the confidence I didn't have a few weeks ago. I'm even doing java, but that's another story. Good luck, and if I can help any further let me know. Den