Building my first web page

[FireStick]

I am fairly new to web page building. I am building a simple page in Word, and I want to insert some jpegs. They are visible when I am editing in Word, but aren't when I publish it to the web. How do I embed the images into the page? Thanks

[mairving]

Rule Number 1. Don't use Word for building Web Pages. It is probably the worst out there besides Publisher. Use Notepad, head over to HTML Goodies and learn some HTML.

The main thing to remember when working with images is that you don't embed them in a page. You link to the image via it's path. So on your local machine, the path to the image may be C:\My Document\picture.jpg . On the web, this won't work since the picture won't be in the proper path. Usually create a sub-directory in your web folder called images and link to it like so: <img src="/images/picture.jpg" width="" height="" alt="">. that way the path is the same for everyone.

[FireStick]

So you don't actually upload the image on the page, you upload the images individually and link them to the page? If that makes sense. Thanks for the help.

[glc]

If you don't want to learn HTML and need to get a simple page up, you can use Netscape or Mozilla Composer to build a page "wysiwyg" (what you see is what you get). It's probably the best freebie wysiwyg editor out there. Believe it or not, Word 97 isn't too bad converting a document to HTML, but Word 2000 is horrible - it does everything XML and bloats the code horribly. The best "converter" I've found is Arachnophilia - it converts RTF (rich text format) files to nice tight HTML code, and is a decent code editor too. I haven't tried the new Java crossplatform version 5 yet - I still use version 4 for Windows.

You now have the correct concept - HTML is just text, images have to be uploaded separately and "linked" in the HTML code.

[mairving]

A couple of other notes.

• HTML is fairly easy to learn but things like image and text placement are somewhat more difficult since they involve tables. Tables are the key to HTML. Eventually they will be replaced by CSS but for now learn a bit about tables.
  
• The above example listed this code: img src="/images... . I tend to put the / in front of the directory so that it will work even if you are in a sub-directory. Using the / on a local machine where a server does not parse the code will give different results. On the local machine use: img src="images...
  

[SudyZenziGrg]

hi mairving,
just curious know why will the table be replaced by CSS. Every webpages are designed in tables. so is it going to affect anything?

[mairving]

Originally posted by SudyZenziGrg hi mairving, just curious know why will the table be replaced by CSS. Every webpages are designed in tables. so is it going to affect anything?

Well, HTML really wasn't designed for the complexites that it is used for now. Tables were never really meant to be used for page layout. HTML was never really meant for presentation either. CSS is much better and page layout but the support in older browsers in not quite there. I am not suggesting redoing sites done in tables right now but in the future it will offer you some presentation advantages. Right now you are somewhat limited in the use of CSS if you want to maintain compatibility with older browsers. Here are a couple of sites done without tables:
http://www.macedition.com/cb/samples/div_mac2W.html
http://www.alistapart.com/index.html

[SudyZenziGrg]

hi there,
the site looks nice without the use of the tables. thanks for posting the URLs and for your help. Cheers!!!

[Eric H.]

well, since you're using word, you probably have a version of frontpage, which despite what people say, isn't a bad editor.

[mairving]

Originally posted by Eric H. well, since you're using word, you probably have a version of frontpage, which despite what people say, isn't a bad editor.

FP doesn't come with Office Standard. Most people probably wouldn't have it installed. FP express is generally installed by default on 9x systems. FP is better than Word no doubt, but there are much better choices (Notepad, Homesite, Dreamweaver, Editpad) out there. As far as writing the worst code, the bottom 3 would be Publisher, Word and Adobe GoLive. FP code is okay for the most part. The chief problem with it is that most sites done with FP look like it and it doesn't know anything about stylesheets which means it bulks up on font, center tags.