Area 10 [archive] - BUILD YOUR OWN WEBSITE PART THREE

First, install WordPerfect Suite 8 on your Computer. If you experience any technical problems with installation, the organization from which you've bought the package should be able to give telephone advice on how to resolve them. I might add we didn't experience any difficulties whatever on installation.

Open the program. You will find you have a blank white page in front of you, and a "Perfect Expert" bar down the left hand side in grey, with WordPerfect at the top of it and various different options (start, write a draft, etc.) upon it.

At the top of your screen (underneath the File - Edit - View [etc.] options, is a tool bar with a lot of different pictures on it, from a piece of paper on the left to something that looks like vaguely like a shuttlecock on the far right. This is your "Perfect Expert" option. Click on it - a couple of times - and watch your left hand bar disappear and re-appear. [You will need to know about this option later as sometimes you will need to use a full-width page in pagebuilding.]

Okay. Next item you need is the "web page" icon right next to the shuttlecock. Click on this (once). You may get a "warning" on your screen telling you that your page is about to be formatted as a web document. If so, click on "okay" - and your whole page goes grey. Also you will notice that the left-hand Perfect Expert bar has changed its wording - now headed "Internet Publisher" instead of WordPerfect.

You have just created your first Web Page. The rest of the process (putting what you want on there - text, colours, backgrounds, gifs, animations - is just as easy, so long as you take it step by step.

For your first page, suppose you just have some text such as "Welcome to John Bull's Home Page. You can get in touch with us at: john.bull04@happychild.org.uk" [substitute whoever you are for John Bull, and include your own e-mail address].

To achieve this, first select your "font". Top left of your screen you will see the font face displayed as (probably) Times Roman, in a white box surrounded by grey. Click on the down arrow next to Times Roman, and you should get a whole range of possible typefaces (if you installed the full WordPerfect Suite 8 software, and also conditional on you having set the software up with a print option - we found on re-installing WordPerfect Suite 8 on our new computer, that we could only get Times Roman until we'd done the set-ups for printing as well).

Click on a typeface (we use Comic Sans MS but select whatever suits your purposes) and because you have chosen this before inputting any text you may find it acts as a default typeface for your whole page (doesn't always, especially within tables, but seems to do so on occasion).

Select a type size (use the down arrow next to the figure 12 in the next box to Times Roman) and click on whatever you want (eg 18) [this, like everything else, you can modify later if wished].

Then click on Format (very top of page, 5^th item along), click on Justification, and select Center (americanised spelling) - which will bring your cursor (the place you start typing) into the middle of the page. Press carriage return half a dozen times (large key with bendy arrow extreme right of typing letters] to bring you some distance down the page. Then type "Welcome to John Bull's Home Page" [substitute your own text] - this will centre across page automatically.

Use a couple more carriage returns, then type: "You can get in touch with us at" and then use one more carriage return. Then type " john.bull04@happychild.org.uk [substitute your own e-mail address] - note that you don't type the underline. Whenever you type an e-mail address on your page, the hyperlink (denoted by the underline) adds itself automatically as soon as you put a space after the e-mail address.

Now you have a page that people can visit (even if very basic) and which gives them your e-mail address so they can contact you. [You can also include your postal address, telephone no. etc. or any other simple items which will fit within your page, at this stage, obviously.]

The next step is to save your webpage. You won't be doing this in the usual way (eg File - Save) but following a different route altogether. On the left of your screen should be the "Perfect Expert" grey bar (headed up Internet Publisher): click on "Finish" (below Extras) and you get two options. The first is "View in Browser": click on this to see what your finished page is going to look like up on the Internet. Use File - Close to get back to the page you're working on.

Click on "Finish" again, and this time select (by clicking) "Publish to HTML". This will bring up a mini-screen with three long white boxes across it.

The top one is for the name of your page (and its filepath), and probably reads something like "myfiles\doc" to begin with. Click on the little square at the end of the box, which will bring you to an area where you can start defining your "filepath" for the document you are creating. At the top is a long white bar specifying the current directory, with what looks like a suitcase next to it. Click on the suitcase (one click at a time) to take you back one level at a time to wherever your site-name directory is housed (usually the C or D drive but wherever you put it originally). Click on the site-name (which should appear in the big box once you have the housing drive in the long top box) and this will then show you the areas you've already created (eg ifs, dir, being the area names we chose).

Click on "welcome" (assuming this is the directory where you're putting the page you're currently creating) and "welcome" will appear in the long top box and "Webimage" (or whatever you chose as the name for your graphics file) should appear in the big box.

Underneath the big box is a long white box with the options htm/html. If you click within the box it should highlight these options in blue. Simply type "index" (no quotes) which will replace them. Don't type index.htm or index.html - WordPerfect Suite 8 will add the .htm option for you automatically [later].

Click on Select and this will return you to the screen where you originally had "my files\doc" but now with the correct filepath for your page [in the top long box] so it can be automatically located next time you need it.

The next step is the "graphics file path". You have already chosen Webimage (or whatever) as the folder where your graphics are to be located. But, each time you make a new page, you have to "specify the graphics file path" so that the graphics will load up along with your text.

To do this, click on the little square on the right of the middle long white box. Depending on whether you're in Windows 95 or 98 this will either give you similar options to what you had when identifying the document file path, or it might give you a directory structure like the one in Windows Explorer. Either use the "suitcase" method (if appropriate) or else simply follow the "tree structure" to find your site-name and the welcome directory you have already created. If the Webimage sub-directory isn't visible, click on the "welcome" file title (or the little plus sign to the left of it, if there is one) to get the Webimage sub-directory to drop down. Then click on this once to highlight it in blue, and click on "Select".

In the long box underneath the big box with Webimage in it, you probably had something like *.* (this just means "all files within that folder, with any extensions" [the bit that comes after the dot]). The reason for not typing anything in there is that you want all the contents of the Webimage folder to be accessible from the page you are building, not just parts of it.

Having clicked on Select, you are now returned again to the screen where you originally had "myfiles\doc" (or similar). Except that now you have the top box (page file path) and the middle box (associated graphics file path) both correctly completed.

It is worth pointing out at this stage (in case I don't get chance to refer to it later) that you should ALWAYS check the graphics file path in the same way, when you make a new page. This is because this will not change automatically from the last time you identified a graphics file path. This is jolly useful when you're working on consecutive pages within the same directory - but not so if you're working on a page within one directory then making another one in another directory. When you do repeated saves on a particular page you're working on (every 10 minutes is about right) you will only need to identify the graphics file path the first time - but you DO need to specify the filepaths the first time you work on a page, and the graphic filepath when you first re-open an already-made-page.

Now - back to your save screen. The long box at the bottom is entitled "Location of graphics on Web Server (optional)". Here, you simply type Webimage (or whatever name you have chosen for your graphics file). No "filepaths" to worry about here because you will create a Webimage sub-directory for each of the directories (and sub-directories) you create across your site. This is time-consuming initially but means (a) you can easily identify that you have the right graphics in your sub-folder linked to a particular directory; (b) that Webimage will always be the correct place for your Internet site to find related graphics for any particular page.

[If you're planning to use lots of graphics on your site (and are worried about using up too much of your home page space with multiple graphics files), find out how much space your server gives you free (please refer to Part 8, linked below). To give you a rough idea of what you might need eventually, we currently use around 40Mb with 800+ pages on our site (August 1999) - so you're probably looking at a requirement of 1Mb for each block of 20 pages on your site, allowing for approximately the same graphics content that we use (and not including any files for separate FTP download).

To return to your web page ..... by now you have identified the three major paths for your page, both for your hard-drive and for your Internet use of the page. All that remains is to close your page. To do this, click on File - Close. You will get an option to "save" your file - select NO. If you select YES you will bring up options to "save in word perfect" "save in HTML" and "other". These options are primarily for if you're not working on web pages (in which case you would have used the normal file - save route) - if you click on yes (even for the html) you will end up with another copy of your page, sometimes with a double .htm extension, sometimes with the extension .htm.wpd (word perfect document). It is a lot simpler (with respect to uncluttered directories) simply not to save in this manner unless you're working on non-web pages.

You have already saved your file in the correct way. If you go to Windows Explorer (in Windows 98 hold down the Windows key and press E at the same time; in Windows 95 use Start - Programs - Explorer : you can "minimise" your present screen before doing so but don't have to - to minimise go extreme top right of your screen and click on the little single line) - you can check that your newly-created page has come up in your welcome directory.

Then you can exit WordPerfect Suite 8 and you're ready to load your first page up on the Internet.

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