Getting Started With Your Web Site

1. PLAN. It is essential that you plan your web site. Create a storyboard with one page for every page in your site. In the upper right corner name each page. Follow these rules: use only letters and numbers. No spaces! No weird characters. ONLY letters and numbers.Identify the picture or pictures you will place on each page. It is usually best to limit the number of pictures to one or two per page. Make notes about what text you will be adding. Create a header for each page. Think about the links that will be on each page. This requires you to think about how you will organize your site. An outline helps!

2. Get you pictures together on your pen drive. Name them appropriately. Follow the same rules for naming your pages: use only letters and numbers. No spaces! No weird characters. ONLY letters and numbers.

3. Using Picasa (or Photoshop or Elements if you already know how to use Photoshop or Elements), prepare your pictures. You may want to rotate your pictures, crop them, enhance them with the many tools available in Picasa. But you MUST export them to reduce their storage size. When we use the word "size" with images, we can mean two different things (but they are related). Size can mean the PHYSICAL size of an image, usually expressed in inches (in the United States) or dpi (pixels per inch). Generally we use 72 dpi as the goal for images that will be displayed on screens. Size can also mean the storage space required on a storage device for an image. Our goal is to keep our images under 150 Kb. If you View your files using the Details option under the View menu you can immediately see the storage size of the image and the physical size expressed in pixels. On a Mac you would use the middle choice for displaying file information.

In Picasa, select the images you will be using. EXPORT them to a folder which indicates they are the ones you will use in your project. Set them to be exported at a width of 480 pixels and automatic compression. This will result in the pictures being appropriately sized for storage AND physical placement on your web page. It is important that these "resized" images be placed in a special folder so that your original images will not be overwritten.

3. Sign in to your Google account. Go to pages.google.com. The first time you do this, scroll to the bottom of the page and accept the terms. Then click the link to start your web site. You will arrive at a page which is a "starter" page. Find the link (upper left) to the Site Manager. The Site Manager in GooglePages is equivalent to Dashboard in Blogger.

4. The most important thing to remember from the material covered in class is that every time you create a new page you should IMMEDIATELY put in the name of your page following the rules specified above. Google asks you to insert the "title" of your page. DO NOT follow Google's instructions. Instead, follow my instructions and insert the NAME of your page as you have determined it.

5. Before class on Thursday (Monday class - proceed with adding pictures and text to your pages as specified below), you should concentrate on setting the Layout and the Look. Bring your pictures to class on Thursday!

6.After you have used Picasa to reduce the size of your pictures (we will cover this Thursday), begin to place your pictures and your text on each page. Do not attempt to add links at this stage. It will be much easier later when you are absolutely sure about the organization of your site. I would also avoid changing the Header at this time. Leave it as the name of your page for the time being. It will be easier if you change to your real header at a later date.

7. Be sure you know the source of your picture. You will have to add that later.

8. Call or email me if you have questions.