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Home-page designers show how to make your on-line documents stand out. Maybe the idea of an electronically interconnected global community, breathing as one Net organism, somehow fills society's spiritual void Or perhaps it's to our practical sensibilities that the Web appeals promising instantly updatable documents, quickly produced and distributed without harm to a single tree. But then again, it could just be greed: why pay service bureaus, printers, and the post office to peddle our ideas to the masses when we can do it ourselves (in full color!) for free?
Whatever the motivation, the mere thought of publishing documents via the Internet's World Wide Web has many publishers salivating But before you dig in, dreaming up layouts for your fantasy Web pages, here's an item that may dull your appetite creating pages in HyperText Markup Language (or HTML, the Web's text-only language) is more like programming than it is like designing with today's graphical publishing tools. Forget about specifying fonts, leading, or even setting justification your readers (or their browser software) do this for you. And the formatting you can control, such as separating paragraphs or distinguishing headlines from body Copy is set by writing and embedding esoteric text codes ( called tags) in our documents. And although you can spruce up Web pages with dramatic full -color images or downloadable clips of video and sound, you can't get too carried away with these either. If everybody had Power Macs and T1 lines, you could go crazy with it, putting large high-resolution graphics on every page. Most folks surfing the Net have less powerful machines, slower connections, and limited patience. So designing a Web site is largely a balancing act between performance and aesthetics.
HTML's limitations are a small price to pay given the powerful reach of this new publishing medium. Plus HTML improves with age: the newest spec (called HTML 3 or HTML+) adds more-versatile capabilities (such as tabs and flush-right or centered alignment), which most browsers promise to support in their next releases. So don't be discouraged. If you're familiar with the style-sheets feature in your desktop design software you're already one step ahead of the game.
Tag, You're! It Although any word processor can generate an HTML document, specialized HTML editors make life much easier. HTML editors run faster than their more robust word-processing counterparts. More important, they supply a list of built-in tags and in some cases offer an instant preview of how your formatted text will appear in a browser. HTML converters, on the other hand, take your regular word processor files and convert them to HTML automatically.
But don't think these save you from all coding responsibility. If you've used a format that HTML doesn't support, such as colored text, the converter simply ignores the formatting, and you'll have to come up with some other way to highlight the text. The copy could look awful , even illegible, depending on the font the viewer has picked. Test your pages in a number of browsers to be sure they're working. For a look at how other people are creating pages, start by snooping at the source code ( the documents with tags displayed ) of your favorite Web sites. Most browsers offer a View- Source or similar command for this purpose, and it's a good way to familiarize yourself with the available HTML formatting tags.
On the Links The nicest thing about the Web is that no matter how boring a page gets, there's almost always a road leading to someplace better. Hypertext links provide one way out, letting viewers jump to another page (yours or somebody else's) simply by clicking on highlighted text.
Let us design a Web Page for you. We can
get you a commercial name, register it on the net, arrange for
connection to an Internet Provider or even get a T1 line for you.
We will install a web server and set it up to your specifications.