How to go about the web design

[chocolate]

Hi, The video's, etc have been good to show how to do things but what I feel is lacking is info on how to go about creating a site. For instance, I've come up with a Homepage fairly quickly and easy but then the next page I want to do I want to show my dogs that I have bred as a registered breeder and so Ideally a page where I can have a small pic of each with there name to click on to see each individual dogs page. I pulled in one of the photo galleries but I'm not finding it easy to edit. Is this perhaps not the best way to go about it?

[cursor]

At first, any new environment can be difficult to follow. With time and persistance, however, you'll develop an understanding of how objects, layers, and tools can be manipulated with surprising control.

When you use elements from the Design gallery, take some time to disect them ... see how they are constructed (by those who really know the program forward and backward). Little by little your confidence and ability will grow.

[gwpriester]

Welcome to the Web Designer forum.

Start out with an outline on paper of how you want your website to work.

Figure out for example how you want the visitor to navigate your site.

A small thumbnail of each dog might have a brief description and when the visitor mouses over the thumbnail, a larger image with a detailed description could appear under the photo on a pop up layer.

Or each thumbnail photo can link to a new page with information and perhaps more photos about that particular dog.

This is why you need to do the outline first before doing the term paper.

[Ross Macintosh]

Hi Chocolate

Please note that there are even easier ways to have a gallery than using the pre-designed ones. If on your page you import a pic and resize it down to use as a thumbnail, then all you have to do is select it, right-click and choose 'web properties...' from the context menu. In the dialogue box that opens choose the 'Link' tab and in it select 'PopUp Photo' and hit the 'Okay' button. Preview your page and you'll see that when you click on that pic a larger version will pop up with a nice animated effect. Very simple!

Note that in the 'PopUp Photo' setting you can specify how large you want the picture to be.

I attach an example .web file that uses this simple approach to making a custom gallery. Open it and do the web preview. In my example I included text beside each thumbnail to suggest a way of including info about each image. The numbers and size of your thumbnail images, and amount of text you include, is entirely up to you as the designer. You are a God on your own web site!

In my example page I also made a simple graphic background by bringing in a pic, resized it accordingly, and gave it transparency and feathering. I also note that if you apply drop shadows to your thumbnails (as I did) then those shadows will appear in the popups.

Regards, Ross

PS - when you import images for this kind of gallery, just bring in the image once at a resolution suitable for the popup size. For the thumbnails, simply resize it in Xara-WD using the image objects corner handles. You don't need to import multiple resolution versions of your images.