Components of a homepage

Before creating your pages, it is wise to have a draft in mind/paper of what you would like to have on your website. Below are a list of elements you might want to think about :

1. the background color of your webpage.

2. the color of text, and links - On a website there are three types of links -
a. Links - if you are visiting a page for the first time, all the links will be in this color.
b. Visited links - links that you have already visited on a page are in this color.
c. Active links - if you are returning to a page that has been linked by another page, the current page link will be in this color.

* it is left to you to decide on the color for each type of link - for consistency it is better to give different colors for each type of link.

3. Tables
a. how many rows and columns are required and the spacing between them.
b. the alignment of the table on the page, and the alignment of the data in each table.
c. the color of the table and whether you would like the table border to be visible/invisible.

4. Images
a. the type of image - websites usually contain two main types of images - GIFs and JPEGs. JPEGs are generally larger in file size than GIFs but are of better quality than the latter. While GIFs are of 256 colors, JPEGs are of thousands of colors. Thus in a GIF image, the transition from one color to another is quite prominent, and in a JPEG the transition from one color to another is smooth. Animations which are a collection of single images combined and manipulated to perform a certain action, are also in the format of GIFs.

b. the size of the image and its alignment on the page.

* Once you have mastered creating a basic webpage, it is recommended that you browse through the Image Manipulation section of Web Design, to gain a better understanding of images and how to edit them to suit your needs.

5. Audio and Video -
Though it seems rather difficult, embedding audio and video files on your webpage are as easy as saying 1,2,3. You follow the same procedure as embedding an image, but should note that audio and video files take up a sizeable amount of space, and thus the time taken to load your page becomes longer. For more information regarding audio and video editing please browse through the Audio and Video section of Web Design.

Organizing your files

The first file that the client * accesses from your website is index.html. Whether you have only one page or several pages of information to be put on the web, the first page that you would like browsers to see, should be named index. Why index you ask and not some other obscure name - well that is simply the convention the computer uses. All other files that the index file links to can be given names of your choice.

* (a client is the computer that connects to your website - in truth, your files are stored on a computer called a server, and the client views your website by accessing your files from the server)

when organizing your files before you upload them to the server, it is wise to categorize specific types of files into specific folders - for instance, you would want to place all the image files into a folder called images - for consistency. Similarly audio and video files, background images and animations should be placed in their respective folders.

All of these files are organized into different folders/directories as illustrated below: