So I Wanna Website Of My Own.....

[skandy32]

hello, and happy new year everyone!

With the arival of some more camera equipment for xmas, i am now taking even more snaps than before. And i would like to publish them online.

I've done pinkbike, msn myspace and other freebee bits n bobs in the past and i have a rough knowledge of what i need to do it. I want my site to look super proffessionall as i would like to direct possible future clients to it to view my work.... you get my drift....

So i would like to know please if anyone has any advice.

I would like to make it on photoshop, the slice it etc into Macromedia, but then im stuck, as i've never put a website i've made actually online......

With a guess, i need a server? and a domain name? is that it? i can upload it up through macromedia yes? or would i need something liek ftp?

also, is there something easier than this photoshop to MX idea i have ? - something dead basic i can begin with, because obviously i'm going to be playing with 10s, maybe 100s of images... and i wanna experiment a bit

Cheers Guys in advance!!

Andy

[fredrico]

My Brother did exactly what you want too do. He payed for a members account using Freewebs which enabled him to use macromedia and other similar software whilst having his own domain address without having freewebs in it. Then he contacted google to get it put in the google search list. I think freewebs sort you out with a server but im not too sure. And O and about photoshop, paintshop pro is very similar but easier to use when dealing with photos.

(Ill find out about being able to use macromedia to create your website and edit when done)

Or alternatively contact http://www.xl-designs.com/cudgel/. His tf name is Simon

Edited January 3, 2006 by fredrico

[Simon]

If you care about XHTML standards, or using div's over tabular layouts, then ignore everything i say.

Using a photoshop sliced pre-formatted html page can be very tricky when you start out, as you have a .htm/.html page and you're probably thinking, what the hell do i do to get content in, and links in.

To get the best out of your dreamweaver experience, you have to prepare your slices properly in photoshop first. So you mark with the slicer where you want the content to go, where you want the navigation to go. It's easier if you have the navigation as text, i.e, not as separate images, but separate images and rollover's can easily be achieved with a bit of time and effort. If you do want the navigation to be images, then instead of drawing round each button, unless you have no option too, draw round the whole of the navigation block, so you can then just draw hotspots on in dreamweaver.

Once you've got it sliced, and loaded into dreamweaver, you need to start making it work. Make sure its in design view, and if it looks at all wrong, just ignore it. Dreamweaver has problems with rendering stuff correctly in design view. Now click once in the area you want to "make work", and it should highlight the cell in the table, or highlight the image, both are the same. Now go into code view, and you should see the line or image highlighted. It should look something like that, but not exactly, you may have more rows, more columns, what ever, but generally you will see;

<tr> 
        <td> 
            <img src="images/btc_after_PSD_09.gif" width="750" height="105" alt=""></td> 
    </tr>

It's the "<td><img></td>" we are interested in. Right, now you have the area you want to make work, you have some different options. One, you draw hotspots on the image, in which case, simple go back to design view, click on the image you want links to be on, look to the bottom left of dreamweaver, and you'll a black arrow, and 3 blue shapes, with a box for "Map" above them. Click which ever you need, then draw over the button you want to link, it's pretty straight forward after that. Two, the image is one solid colour, and has nothing else on it, in which case, to save loading times, you do this;

<tr> 
        <td bgcolor="#006666" width="750" height="105"> 
        </td> 
    </tr>

Where the #006666 is the colour that takes up the image. Also notice i've added in the width and height properties from the image, this is to keep it all looking as it should, and not screw up. Three, is the most common, where you just want to be able to write properly over the image, and is achieved by making the image in the cell, the background of the cell, instead of the content, like so;

<tr> 
        <td background="images/btc_after_PSD_09.gif" width="750" height="105"> 
            <!--<img src="images/btc_after_PSD_09.gif" width="750" height="105" alt="">--></td> 
    </tr>

I've encapsulated the <img> tag in HTML quote tags, so it wont display on the page, but incase you screw up the cell code (<td>), you can simple remove it, and put the image back again.

This is very basic, but maybe it helps you in some way.