Before You Start After you have designed your web site, you can now create the web pages, and associated files such as graphics, sounds, animations, etc. When you are making your pages it is very important that you are consistent with regard to certain things. This will help you to avoid a lot of potential problems in the future such as broken links and images. 1) Be consistent with your filenames and filename extensions. Web pages have the extension .html or .htm. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. However, you could ALSO use .HTML, .HTM, .HtMl, and so on. If you are not consistent with your filename extensions it can cause BIG problems. The operating system on qcpages.qc.cuny.edu, unix, is CASE-SENSITIVE. This means that test.HTML and test.html are treated as two completely different files. This is a primary cause of broken links on pages, especially with people who are beginners at producing web pages. I recommend that you end all of your web page files in .html and that you use all lowercase letters in your filenames. Some persons do use the convention of capitalizing the first letter of names in filenames. For example, some people will use the name MathAnxiety.html instead of mathanxiety.html and this is fine. You are free to name files any way you want but it is important that you decide on a system and stick to it. I tend to use a hyphen when I need a space. So I might make a file named science-education.html Just make sure to be consistent. When you get a large web site with lots of files, it is a big help if you have a consistent naming system. 2) Do NOT put spaces in file names. Windows and Mac operating systems allow you to put spaces in file names. This can cause problems on unix systems. Therefore, A good filename: web-page-one.html 3) Use descriptive names for your file names. However, don't make the file names too long. For example, if you have a web site about flowers you might give each page a name that is related to the content, e.g. daisy.html, roses.html, and so on instead of non-descript names like page1.html, page2.html 4) Your first page on the web site, (sometimes called the 'home' page) should always be named index.html This is a convention that all web browsers recognize and it shortens the URL to your web site. If someone wanted to visit 'username's' web site they could use either of the following URL's: http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/~username 5) Organize your files using folders. Make an /images folder and put all of your graphics there. If you use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) put your .css files in a /css folder. 6) When linking, create all of your files first, then browse for the files to avoid broken links. 7) If you have a broken link, check your html source code. You can do this in the following ways:
|