Make Your Own Web Page with Composer: A Quick Reference Guide

• Dave's site picks up where this inservice lets off (not me, another Dave. Sorry). This gets into the nuts and bolts of HTML programming for when you decide that you've got more time to waste on your website than Composer can possibly eat up. Highly recommended if you haven't got a life.
• Web Pages that Suck: "Learn good design by looking at bad design." Another valuable place in which to fritter the hours away...
• the Yale Style guide for webpages: the definitive catalog of 'how to' for academic design

Getting Started:

• Open Communicator
• Select Communicator, Composer
• Format, Page Colors and Properties, set colors
• Type your text
• Insert images
• Highlight, insert links
• Save to a designated web page folder
• Send it to the internet

Topics:

Alignment and bullets

• Align command found under "Format"
• To indent, use the pictures that look like sideways graphs w/arrows (under the H. Line button)
• Bullets and numbering are found under the "Target" button. These are very dicey to use and not easily manipulated as, say, those in Word

Appearance

• Format, Page Colors and Properties
• Adjust the text colors
• Set the colors for the text on your page

NOTE: To adjust for  special colors or size or font on a case-by-case basis, close out of this view and use exactly the same procedure as for regular word processed document

CAREFUL: use only ‘normal’ fonts (e.g. Arial, Helvetica, Times, Comic Sans, Courier)

• Select a background
• Color
• Image
• The image will automatically store in the same folder unless you check "save in original location"
• Any image w/gif or jpg format
• Give your page a name
• Format, Page Colors and Properties, General

Images

• John's Background Page
• The Iconbazaar
• Dewa
• Clip-art.com
• Flamingtext or Cooltext for custom word graphics
• Try any search engine under backgrounds, clip art, graphics, etc

Lines

• Insert a horizontal line by clicking on the H. Line button
• Format by right clicking on the line

Links

• Text
• Highlight text to be linked
• Click "link"
• Destination
• Page on the internet: type in COMPLETE address (including http://www…)
• One of your other pages: Click "Choose File," navigate to the desired page
• Make sure the page is saved (or it won't show up as one of your options)
• The page must be located EXACTLY in your folders as it will be on the internet
• Image
• Click on image
• Click "link"
• Destination
• Page on the internet: type in COMPLETE address (including http://www…)
• One of your other pages: Click "Choose File," navigate to the desired page
• Make sure the page is saved (or it won't show up as one of your options)
• The page must be located EXACTLY in your folders as it will be on the internet
• IMPORTANT: After you've made the link, go back to the image's properties and make sure to change the "solid border" number to 0 (if not, you'll get an annoying box around the picture like this: 
• Email
• Can be via an image or text
• Make a link, type in the address mailto:emailaddress.com (where, obviously, you substitute your email for "emailaddress.com." Don't use any spaces, punctuation, etc.
• Remember, though, that kids won't be able to email you from school

Tab key

• Only used to maneuver around within or add a row to a table
• No formatting is 'preserved;' use the indent buttons

Tables

• Personal Choice: all my pages are contained within a table across 80% of the window
• VERY HELPFUL!! Used to organize, place text in columns, etc.
• Can be colored using Format, Table Properties commands

Targets

• Links to specific places within a webpage
• Example: The table of contents at the top of this page is linked to "targets" that I placed in front of each subject heading

Word Documents

• Can be easily saved into webpages
• File, Save As HTML command
• Use Composer to format after conversion