STYLE AND TEMPLATES

Now it’s time to make some real decisions about your website considering all the areas we have covered so far. We are going to build the Index (commonly known as Home page) and this is the most important page on your site.

Research tells us regularly that at least half of your website visitors will not go beyond the first page so it has to give your primary message on one page.

This page will also be the base template for all the other pages on your site - introducing all those common elements which your website visitor will expect to see throughout the website. These include a clear message about what your website is all about; an effective design with strong images; your navigation areas and contact details.

So have your paper plan (Step 4 ) to hand then, bearing in mind your thoughts on design and colour and the use of tables, let’s open Dreamweaver and begin work on a new blank page.

First go to the ‘title’ box at the top of your screen and type in the words Home Page as this will be the commonly used name that your visitors will expect to see and this, like all page titles can be read by the search engines.

Immediately File > Save As and call the page index then save it into your Root folder on your hard drive. Remember this will be the only .html page which is outside the pages folder and also remember all your files, as well as folder names, must be in English and in small letters (lowercase), 8 letters with no spaces or punctuation marks included.

Now you must decide on the table design you want to use throughout your website - with slight modifications according to the page content and also think about colour.

You will need a table cell for the main heading, perhaps with an adjacent cell for a logo; a cell for your navigation; a cell for your contact details and then other cells for the page content which will include text and pictures, or graphics.

See our example