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Welcome to your Drayton St Leonard page |
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Guide to creating your own page on this website This Drayton St Leonard website has always been a place to share information about our village, and all that goes on here. Right from the start I have been keen to encourage people to submit material for inclusion on the website. Contributions from anyone are welcome; the website should not just be a one man effort. Many of the pages you see have indeed been submitted by others, and a footnote on the page tells you who the author is. (Major updates will be noted similarly, but minor corrections and changes will generally not be noted in this way but only mentioned in the website's update log .) However in the past the mechanism to achieve that has been a bit clumsy. There have been no guidelines, and therefore copy has been submitted in a variety of formats, and sometimes it has been quite hard to incorporate it into the site. That's not meant as a criticism of any contributors. So to make the process easier, and therefore to encourage more contributions from others, I have created a "template" page which you are free to copy and edit to create your page. This can then much more easilly be incorporated into the main site. Firstly you can find the template page by clicking here. When the page is displayed on your screen, right click somewhere on the centre of the page and select "view Source". This will open Notepad with a copy of the page source code open ready for editing. You now need to save the page with a filename of your choice and the extension .htm - choose the single file option. This is the file you will use to create your own page. (Note: if you are using a Mac, or are using Netscape you may need to use an alternative method to create a copy of that file.)Then edit that file to create the page you want. How you edit it is entirely up to you, using whatever web page editing tool you wish. You may simply do as I do, and use notepad and edit the raw html code, or you may choose Word or FrontPage to edit in more of a wysiwyg environment, or any of the many other website editing programs available. You are free to add pictures, drawings, tables, links etc or whatever content makes your page fulfill it's purpose. Colour pictures are best saved as JPEG files, and line drawings are best saved as GIF files. Try to make the picture files as efficient as possible, or if you don't have the tools to do that, then request that I do it for you. Smaller files make the page faster to load under all conditions. Relatively complicated layouts like that of the 'News And Views' can be preserved in PDF coded files. There are however a few guidelines that I would encourage you to stick to, to try and keep a common look and feel to all the page. The first is all pages now have a common header at the top which is the title of the website, and the small picture of the church is also a hyperlink which will take you back to the home page. Secondly, the main content of the page is always displayed inside a table of 700 pixels wide. This is done to ensure that the page will fit onto a printed A4 page, and so makes the whole site printer friendly. I normally put the page title in bold text at the top left of the main part of the page, and the name of the author at the bottom. Don't be put off if you can't handle editing web pages directly, I will still accept contributions in just about any format. This new procedure is hopefully to make things easier and encourage more contributions. The less work the webmaster has to do, the sooner it is likely to get on the site! Send your contributions by email to webmaster@draytonstleonard.co.uk or put them on a disk and drop them through the webmaster's letterbox (currently Steve Cox). However you send your contributions, please remember to include any necessary files such as pictures. Dave Hewitt |
