Creating your Home Page

This week we started to create our home pages. I was very surprised to notice that many of you had not set up your web sites correctly, some not at all. Earlier I told you that you should create a folder in the ..\My Documents\My Webs\ path on your C drive. There is a good reason for this. It is a special folder created by your Windows system to hold web pages. Also it makes everything easier to find, you don't have to click through many folders to get to it.

To set up your web site in Dreamweaver see the video tutorial from the Teach-ICT web site. Here is the link: Setting up a New Site

I also noticed that some of you had placed your web pages in a sub-folder of your main web site folder. This will NOT work. You must place your web pages in the root of your web site folder, that means not in any sub-folders. Actually it's only the home page that need be in the root folder but it is good practice to leave the others there as well. Which brings me to the home page. After you had set up your W drive to store your web pages, some of you could not see your home page when you tried to view it with Internet explorer. This is because you named your home page something other than index.htm. The home page MUST be called index.htm because Internet Explorer looks for this page first if you enter a URL without specifying a page name. So if you dont have an index page your browser will give an error message.

To set up your home page correctly have a look at the Teach-ICT video here: Setting up a Homepage


When you make any changes to the names of your pages or move them from folders, you should do this from within Dreamweaver. That way Dreamweaver can make any changes in links etc automatically for you.

Remember you should use tables to layout your web page according to your layout plan you created earlier. You can do this in either standard or layout view. Try not to make your tables too complicated. I have seen many of you create large unwieldy tables and content appears scattered all over the page. Remember your research about good web design. Take a look at this site for some ideas: Current Styles in Web Design Also here is an interesting article from Matt Brown of the Dreamweaver community. Matt Brown on Good Design

Thats all from me for now. Happy page building.