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Web Design help/guidelines

We have many members designing some of our project pages, or wanting to learn web design for their own sake. Here are some pointers, links, etc to help, as well as some requested guidelines for design of pages intended to go on our web site to help our "look" stay consistent and easy to maintain.

PLEASE realize that spending a lot of time in MS Word making your document look pretty will probably NOT end up producing a good looking web page. If you use a word processor vs. a true web page program, simpler will probably end up easier to make into a web page (HTML code) and look closer to what you intended.

HTML editors

There are many programs out there to create web pages for you.

The simplest way is to use your favorite text editor (Notepad, emacs, etc) and code your HTML directly (see references below). Most likely free.
Dreamweaver by Macromedia. (commercial product) $$
Front Page by Microsoft. (commercial product) $$
Many word processors (like MS Word) will save documents as HTML. They may not be as full-featured, and quite honestly they produce some gnarly HTML code, but they work, and most people already have access to one.
.....There are certainly many other ways as well.

HTML and Style Sheets

The HTML 4.01 specification. Great as a reference for all tags.
Some tutorials on HTML, style sheets, javascript, etc.
Another guide on style sheets.
Want to see how "correct" your web page is? Use HTML TIDY to check your HTML for bugs.
Yet more tutorials.

Image size vs. download speed

Reduce your image size so your pages will download faster. Remember, most of your audience may have only 56k modems. Just in case you don't follow the link, remember to limit your images to 72dpi. This is as much as most monitors display. Beyond 72dpi you are just adding in information that will be thrown away and just make the page take much longer to display.
Want to know how long that image will take to download? Use this downloadspeed estimator.

Guidelines for pages for this site

We have a style sheet we use for most of the pages. Please include this style into your page by adding the line
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/main_style.css">
into the HEAD section of your page. As a consequence, please do not insert your own font tags/sizes, try to use the existing definitions. You may view our style sheet.
To get the same "look and feel" of the rest of the site, with the navigation header and footer, you will need to put
```
<body>
<?
  include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/navjump_header.php";
?>
```
and
```
 <?
  include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/navjump_footer.php";
?>
</body>
```
to include the header and footer files at the opening and closing of the BODY tags. If you need help with this, just ask, not a problem.
If you are using Front Page PLEASE do whatever it is you have to do to get it to not set all the file paths to your local directory (eg. Joe Smith/My files/Web stuff/images/pic1.jpg). Instead this ref should probably just be pic1.jpg or at most images/pic1.jpg.
Please do not put spaces in file names. Use an underscore (_) instead to separate words. eg. Ski_trip_pic.jpg. It is also best to use only lowercase in file names.
Please limit image sizes. 40k REALLY is big enough to look good for most images. Save your image as a jpg and crank that quality down to 60%, 50%, even 40%. You'll be suprised how good the images still look in a browser, and your pages will download much faster.
For any project pages (eg. Haunted House), please design your page to live in a subdirectory (eg. Haunted_House). Make any subpages of this project page be relative to this subdirectory.
Do not put a full path in your hrefs (eg. http://www.raleighjaycees.org/Haunted_House/coupon.html). Simply make the href be coupon.html. This allows us to rearrange things much more easily. Right now, all project pages are housed in a projects/ directory.
Header tags....Here are the current guidelines for header tag (h1, h2, h3, etc) use.
- use h1 tags for the top title.
- use h2 tags for section titles.
- go on from there as needed.

Scripts we use

We use many scripts to add functionality to our site. Some of the major ones are:

Calendarscript (our calendar tool, using the SSI mode for the events on the main page)
Gallery (coming soon as a replacement to our existing scrapbook script)
IkonBoard (our Forums software)
CPG library script (darned simple perl, and similar to the newsletter, in-the-press, and mtg-minutes script)
RosterTool Perl/mySQL script for roster-maintenance. Started here and hopefully easily usable by other clubs.