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  1. #1
    nupe is offline Sapphire level (2000+ posts)
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    Default A home page for my baby?

    Dear Friends:

    I have been working on developing a home page of my own featuring my baby. I have seen Neve and Tristan's site and I think it is wonderful. I think I read on the board that Neve modeled it after another baby's home page.

    I have been going through the help section of MS FrontPage (I think I have 2000 version) trying to learn how to do this.

    Any comments or suggestions on making the process easier? I need help in formatting pages. Also, I am having a hard time trying to figure out how to scale my digital photos to a smaller format but still retain sharpness. I understand how to save files/pics to my server and also how to publish.

    Neve, if you see this, I would especially appreciate any comments from you for web site design.

    Thanks,
    Nupe


  2. #2
    durga8 Guest

    Default RE: A home page for my baby?

    hi nupe, there are some great wyswyg editors that can help you build homepages like Dreamweaver. i am not familiar with MS front page since i use most Mac based applications, though even a simple text editor can do the job, if you can write simple html. html is really pretty simple, and you can either find some online tutorials or get a book that can teach you the basics on laying out a page.

    here is a free html tutorial course online http://www.e-learningcenter.com/free_html_course.htm. says it takes 5 hrs...can't vouch for it, if you use it...let me know what you think.

    also if there are website's you like, you can check out the source code by doing view source using the view menu of your app.

    to get started you'd probably want to plan your site on paper. i usually architect a site with its different levels, plan the navigation bar, gather all the graphics/text that i wan to use. photoshop is a great app. that will let you scale your graphics, create new ones, optimize them... though it is quite pricey, so there may be other apps. someone else can recommend. your photographs have to be compressed as jpgs or gifs. in most cases for continuous tone photos, jpgs work the best. gifs provide good compression for line graphics. you really want to keep your total page size down to 60k or less, so the page doesn't take forever to download on slower connections.

    this should help get you started. let me know if you have any more Q's!





  3. #3
    nupe is offline Sapphire level (2000+ posts)
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    Default RE: A home page for my baby?

    Dear Durga:

    Thanks for those tips. I took a look at the course--I don't know if I will find 5 hours for it. I had read a section on www.photo.net by P Greenspun about authoring a web site. I have photoshop 5.5 which as I recall should be able to scale down my pics--I will have to read more about appropriate sizing for web images in jpg, as you suggest.

    Thanks!

    Nupe

  4. #4
    wookiewoo Guest

    Default RE: A home page for my baby?

    A quick and easy tip that I can give you for FrontPage...
    After you instert a picture into your page, there is a toolbar that will give you some options to work with the picture once you have clicked on it in the page. One nice option is the auto-thumbnail feature.
    I used the auto-thumbnail button and had nothing but pictures with my first site I tried making after I got married. Everyone loved the site because they got to see pictures and I loved it b/c it was quick and easy to do. We have family overseas and maybe that's why they liked just having pictures? Anyhow, HTH

    Heather

  5. #5
    nupe is offline Sapphire level (2000+ posts)
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    Default RE: A home page for my baby?

    Heather:

    So that is how I can make thumbnails! I never noticed this toolbar since it was already at the bottom of the screen.

    All this time I was stuck in Adobe "automate web photo gallery" and trying to figure out how to save this to server rather than my hard drive.

    Thanks for the tip!

    Nupe

  6. #6
    nupe is offline Sapphire level (2000+ posts)
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    Default A home page for my baby!

    It's up! Thanks for your advice. Durga I took your advice to preplan and get materials together. I used Adobe Photoshop to compress photos in jpeg format. Then I used a very basic Frontpage template that I edited somewhat (changed fonts, etc) for the pages as well as the navigation. And then it was easy to insert photos and create the thumbnails in FrontPage as Heather described. I couldn't get the last few pics to save to server so I *think* I am over my data limit.

    Thanks to both of you for your help!

    Nupe

  7. #7
    wookiewoo Guest

    Default RE: A home page for my baby!

    Nupe,

    Congrats on getting your page to work!! I know how great that feels, I had troubles getting everything to work when I uploaded it to our server but it sounds like yours went great :)

    Another tip I can offer if you are working with really limited space on your server is to elimate some of the photos that the thumbnails link to. We have had to just keep the big versions of our most recent (and sometimes favorite) pictures on the site.

    I'm not sure how much space you have, I know that geocities offers 15mb for their free sites and they have some really easy to use page-building tools. I love that they had a guestbook I could use. I'm going to print out the entries for the baby book! HTH
    Good luck with your site!

    Heather

  8. #8
    nupe is offline Sapphire level (2000+ posts)
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    Default RE: A home page for my baby?

    Yes, I have had to delete a few large pics to get all my thumbnails to fit. I think I will need to compress the files a bit more in the future.

    I was not able to line up pictures and captions across browsers/monitors until I put the information into tables.

    Nupe

  9. #9
    pixelprincess Guest

    Default RE: A home page for my baby?

    hey nupe,

    re: saving your photoshop images you can save them with compression under 50 and it should make your file sizes quite a bit smaller. are you using the save for web option under file? you can see the quality of your image if you change the number in the quality box. i even save some at 30...

    good luck.

    formerly durga8

  10. #10
    nupe is offline Sapphire level (2000+ posts)
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    Default RE: A home page for my baby?

    Dear Durga:

    This is what I have been doing lately. I started out at Quality of 50 and have been working my way down. I have been consistently using image size of 40. What do you think of these settings from "save for web" (I am going to try to load a screen shot--if it doesn't load I will type in the settings).

    A related question:

    What is the best way for me to print these web pages out for posterity in DS's album? Kinko's color printer on photo paper? What format/software would capture the web page appropriately? Any thoughts?

    Thanks,
    Nupe

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