project home page
• introduction
• background & more information
finding the images you need
• on-line galleries
• scanning
• making your own
• taking your own
digital image sizes
• digital image sizes
• resolution
• file size
• e-mail
• copyright
adding images to documents
• position
• cropping
• enhancement
• paper size
• posters
image file types
• jpg or gif
• transparency
screen prints and clip art
• screen prints
• clip art
the problems with text
• fonts
• line length
• emphasis
• text boxes
• text images
free tools
• text
• drawing
• image editing
• web page design

Macromedia’s Dreamweaver and its sister Flash still very much lead the way in this field for professionals but a price tag of about £500 puts off many who can’t get licensed copies from their institution.

Creating sites is beyond the scope of this project but for those who simply want to create pages to go onto a Virtual Learning Environment or Intranet have got some tools to hand. Microsoft Word (and other Office elements) has a Save as . . facility which will convert your document into a web page.

The results may not always appear as you require as margins, columns, headers and footers will disappear and you’ll get huge long lines sprawling across a screen, with images usually appearing between paragraphs against the left margin. It will be worthwhile trying out creating your page in another programme to see if you have any more control over the end result without having to attend more classes.

OpenOffice has a specific web page section which is worth looking at. Other free tools which are reasonably easy to use, not time limited or bundled with junk are little reported. Serif WebPlus9™ and NetObjects Fusion8™ (the version numbers are important as they represent huge improvements on the one before) are getting good reviews but, at about £60 for a single-user licence, they are outwith the scope of this project.

Very recent developments in this field may change everything! As featured in the webtools site, there are an increasing number of sites where you can simply create web pages by typing on a page or uploading pictures. SiteKreator and Protopage look very interesting and there are the excellent Pageflakes and Netvibes pages to play with. None of these have intrusive adverts, unlike myspace.com and piczo.com which, whilst very popular indeed, may not be appropriate as they currently stand.

The only contenders at the time of writing appear to be FirstPage™ and Web Dwarf™ which are free and reasonably competent. More information at the links below:

FirstPage by Evrsoft™ at http://www.evrsoft.com
WebDwarf by VirtualMechanics™ at http://www.virtualmechanics.com/products/dwarf

Even these tools, however, will require you to get your head round some of the strange aspects of how things work on web pages. If you do decide to stick with Word or similar then a useful tip is to try and put everything that you want to display in a table.

Two illustrations provided show the difference.
This is the Word file simply saved as a web page. The lines extend right across the screen and images’ positions are changed. It’s not really suitable.

A better version has various components in the cells of a table which keeps them in place and even columns can be reproduced. Most importantly, the width of document text can be controlled. Whilst not brilliant, this could be used as an on-line version of a handout or notes.

Notes for those who would like to get started in Web Design and which illustrate how to get started with Dreamweaver are available at the link below

http://ahi2000.com/studyzone/nwebdesign2dw.htm

or on the LSDA Q Project 2003 DVD.