Tonight we re-examined the steps to follow to ensure that your web site is designed to appeal your target audience.

We also saw how to create external links on our web pages.

By now you should have all of the information and the basic Dreamweaver skills that you need to start creating your web pages.

On Saturday, we will have another look at using tables to organise the design of our web pages. We will also see how to create templates in Dreamweaver.

Using templates has two main advantages

1. It gives your site a consistent look and feel
2. It saves time & effort

Don't forget to draw up a plan of your site layout.

This can be anything from a hand drawn sketch to a carefully crafted plan using an illustration program. You will find it makes things a lot easier if you are clear in your own mind of what you are trying to achieve.

If you have any logo's or images for your site, make sure you bring them along. If you want to create your own logo's, we will be starting to do that next Wednesday, when we have our first look at Fireworks.

In today's class we had a look at most of the factors that we need to consider before we can start to plan our web site.

In the next class we will have a look at the rest of them and start on our actual planning and design, actually you should be able to start the basic planning now. Go to the web design area if you need to review anything.

Don't forget to bring floppy disks and your basic plan to the next class, and don't forget to read chapter 3 of the Dreamweaver Manual

We have spent the last few lessons having a quick look at some of the options that are available to us when creating web pages. We have seen that we can use a simple text editor such as Windows Notepad, an HTML editor, 1st Page 2000, for instance (available for free download from evrsoft.com) and a full blown WYSIWYG tool, like Dreamweaver.

It is Dreamweaver that we will be using mainly from now on, although if we have time we will also have a look at Microsoft FrontPage.

In tonight's class we made a a very simple start by creating some dummy pages and linking them together. And that is all a web site is, a set of pages with links between them. What you put on those pages and how easy the navigation system is, will determine whether or not your site succeeds or fails.

Students should now head over to the Web Design section, where I have started to document the steps to follow when creating a web site

Note - Don't forget to

•  Read chapter 3 of the Dreamweaver manual
•  Define the purpose of your web site
•  Start planning your site on a piece of paper
•  Buy some disk to save your web site on
•  Bring your site plan and disks to the next class

In today's class, one of the subjects that we discussed was the careful use of colour when designing your web site. Here is a great page titled Communicate with Colour. It also contains links to other sources of information on this subject.

I also mentioned that we need to be aware of the problems that colour blind people may have when viewing web sites, see this article on Designing for the Colour Blind, for more information on this subject.

If you want a better understanding of colour blindness then have a look at this article from the Gale Encyclopaedia of Medicine

Still want more information on colour? Then have a look at the Colour Theory section at Kodak's extensive Digital Learning Centre.

In tonight's class one of the items we looked at was the use of fonts. As we discussed, you can't be sure that the viewer of your web site is going to have the same fonts that you have on your computer, so you need to be careful which fonts you use. However, if you want some free fonts for your computer then have a look at 007fonts.com. They have a lot of freeware fonts available and not too many pop up windows (see below).

Further down the track we will be looking at how to convert text into a graphic, for creating logo's etc. You may want to grab some fonts that you can use for this purpose. I've only had a quick look at this site but they appear to have a good range of decorative fonts, which would be ideal for this purpose.

You may also want to have a look at freewarefonts.com which actually provides a page of links to sites with free fonts. Please note, this site, like many sites that offer free stuff will pop up new windows all over the place, and when you close them more windows will pop up - you have been warned.

Just in case you want to know more about fonts have a look at The World of Fonts article at WebReference.Com, this site is a mine of information for web authors.

Another favourite site of mine for information and resources is The Web Developers Virtual Library. Both of these sites should be in your favourites menu, at least while you are doing this course.

And if that isn't enough for you then go to ReallyBig.Com who offer more than 5000 resources for web builders.

I mentioned during the class that the fonts that we use on our PC's are TrueType fonts, just in case you want to know more about TrueType fonts then look at this TrueType information web site.