Hello! and a question

[philphoto]

Hello! My name is Phil, I live on the North Oregon Coast, USA. I am new to Xara and Web Designer 7 Premium. I used Dreamweaver for a number of years, took a few years off to battle terminal cancer -- won so far, and now I am back at it.

I am using WD7 because I just do not want to play catch up on all the coding I used to do. I have forgotten so much. Plus you can have a decent site with WD7 without a bunch of trouble. The cart solutions impressed me. I remember three days of trying to get php/MySql cart linkage when the host did not support that.

What I am trying to figure out:

1. Where do we store the images in the WD7 sites? I am used to an images folder.
2. Where can I find the suggested optimum sizes for graphics to the templates?
3. I have template 1 & 2 and can not find the recommended pixel sizes for headers or photos or ????

Thanks for any help,
Philphoto in Oregon

[pauland]

Hi Phil,

Good to hear that your health is improving - long may it be the case.

Since nobody else has replied, I thought I'd give your questions a little attention, though my Xara software is older than yours.

Where do we store the images in the WD7 sites? I am used to an images folder.

Since you've used DW before, I'll make a comparison with DW and Xara software.

With DW, the designer has complete control over where everything is saved and using an images folder is a common working convention. In DW the designer is working closely with HTML. With Xara, the desiger is pretty much insulated from HTML and the Xara project file holds all the assets for the web site (in large sites it gets to be huge). With Xara you design the site but don't work with HTML (except for a very few situations). The Xara files holds all those assets and page info and at the appropriate time the designer tells Xara to publish the website. At that time Xara looks at the design and generates a website that corresponds with the design, so the place where graphic images are saved is decided by Xara and isn't the same place that Xara gets the images from. Also you will see that Xara generates a lot of images rather than just copying them. Xara is a HTML page generator, while DW is a page assembler (assembling pages from assets supplied by the user).

Build a tiny Xara test website and publish it and see what files you get. Generally expect to see a html file based on the page title and a directory that holds all of the assets used to build that page - including images.

Where can I find the suggested optimum sizes for graphics to the templates?

I don't use templates, but generally make graphics at the same size that you wish to use them, or greater. You can control the quality of the image and filesize by choosing that the image is created as a png or jpeg file. Xara takes care of creating the file according to whether it's been scaled or manipulated.

I have template 1 & 2 and can not find the recommended pixel sizes for headers or photos or ????

I'm not sure what you mean.

I hope that helps a tiny bit.

Paul

[Big Frank]

Hi Phil and welcome to Talkgraphics

1. Where do we store the images in the WD7 sites? I am used to an images folder.

You don't store the images*. Xara does it automatically. Your default index page must be called:

• index.htm
• index.html

Depending on the above, Xara will automatically create a subfolder called:

• index_htm_files
• index_html_files

into which all of your site assets are placed.

When you update a piece of text on a page and then export the site, all of the html pages are updated. If you update a graphic, it's possible that many of the files in the "index" folder will be updated. So remember to upload everything, not just the image you think you have changed.

What I do frequently is simply delete the "index_html_files" folder and upload the new one. This prevents the remote folder getting bloated with redundant images. If you use DW as your ftp client, use the synchronise feature and you'll see the number of images that need to be updated whenever you change a page design!

Speaking of which, I really do recommend you use an external ftp client, my personal favourite is Filezilla. The Xara built in ftp client is for complete beginners to the game and you will find it seriously limiting.

* there are exception to just about all of the above for experienced users but, since you will receive rapid replies on this forum, sometimes in minutes (yes, not your experience this time!), I suggest asking when you need to. I'd suggest taking little steps first if this is your first foray into XDP7, it's not in any way comparable to the DW experience