Community Package
Help Files

Complete instructions and tutorials on how you can build your own website are outside the scope of this set of help files. We will, however, give a brief introduction to the key areas of subject and will also point you in the right direction to some of the excellent resources available both online and offline.

When it comes to you building a site for your community you will probably find that a community member or someone in a community member's family already have the skills to build good web sites.

Planning
Planning your Site Content is the initial phase of building a successful community website. One way to the best Web site design is looking around the Web and learning from what you see, studying what others have done and understanding what works and what doesn't.

If you're going to build a website, take a few moments to think about the best website concepts for you. Take the time to think it through thoroughly before you actually start creating a website. It takes less time and effort to get the layout and flow of the site right the first time than to have to go back and fix problems with your site after it is finished

The Look
Your site needs to be clean, simple, and well-structured. People use the Net to find information. The best Web site design includes informative content, simple layout, easy navigation and fast loading graphics.

On the other hand, your Web site design is a reflection of your community. Web surfers looking for some information not only want the right info, they want it from the right source. Making sure that your site doesn't look like it was designed by a novice helps people to trust in what you say or offer.

A website is built with HTML
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and is the main programming language that makes the Web. Background HTML codes lurk behind all zillions of Web pages on the Net. Many pros actually build Web pages or at least fine-tune them by typing in and editing HTML codes directly. If you don't want to do that, fortunately, you don't have to.

The WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) HTML editors allow beginners to build complex Web pages by simply "dragging and dropping" or inserting content onto the work area. These programs eliminate the need to learn HTML, so you can concentrate on the look of your page.

But if you are serious about doing more than a page or two, it's to your benefit to learn the HTML basics, because these programs generate too much extraneous code and it's often necessary to "tweak" it manually. That's why many pros think that the best Web pages should be hand-constructed.

The basics are quite simple. HTML files are plain text files with special "tags" or HTML codes that a Web browser knows how to interpret and display on your screen.

There are many cheap and easy to understand books to help you build websites as well as many on-line HTML tutorials that you can learn from. Links to some of these as well as some of the free software that will help you can be found in the 'Resources to help you' section.

As you begin to write HTML codes, don't forget to check appearance of your pages on at least the latest versions of Microsoft's Explorer and Netscape's Navigator. You'd be amazed at how differently your Web site appears in different browsers

Fonts
You can specify any font installed on your computer, but if you stray from using the standard fonts that everyone has installed on their computers, the viewer may not see your fonts as intended. Standard fonts include:

• Arial,
• Verdana,
• Times New Roman,
• Georgia,
• Helvetica,
  
• Tahoma,
  
• Comic Sans MS.

This site is mainly written in Georgia.

Loading Times
One of the most significant problems that faces Web designers is slow loading time, which often annoys users to the point where they give up and go to another site. So it is extremely important to design your pages to load as quickly as possible, which means keeping page sizes as low as possible.

Internet users are the least patient people in the world, and if your site is slow, they know they can get the information, products, or services they desire at another site
You can decrease the loading time of your Web site by using common images on your pages, because the images which have already appeared on a previous page will be loaded from browser caches, rather than from the server itself.

If you need to change images from page to page, try to use common elements from other pages. This Web design tactic is especially useful for title bars, which can be broken up into individual images. When a new page is loaded, the elements from the old page are loaded from the cache, leaving only the new elements to be loaded.

When developing professional Web site design, consistency is the most important thing to keep in mind. Nothing is more unprofessional in Website design than a different colored background for every page. Backgrounds, colors, fonts, navigation buttons all need to present your site visitor with a uniform appearance. A consistent Web site not only lets users know where they are, but can also help build a "brand" so your site is recognisable.

Navigation
Regardless of the best Web site design or highly informative content, if your site isn't easily navigable, all your hard development work will be worthless.
No matter where you place your menu bar, keep navigation simple, and make sure it's consistent from page to page.

Screen size
Most of professional Web site designers have better systems than their audience has. The norm these days seems to be 1024x768 although there are still a small number of people using 800x600, mostly because they don't realize they have the ability to switch into a higher resolution.