When to Use Formatting How to Use Formatting Image Basics Image Editing
Sometimes you want to emphasize a bit of text and make it standout.
Other times you just want to go Large. Make sure that you never use . ALL CAPS IS LIKE YELLING IN THE INTERNET WORLD. IT IS BAD NETIQUETTE. Also be sure not to underline words in a sentence for emphasis. Many people will misinterpret it as a link to click on.
You can format an entire document using basefont tags, but that is not necessary. You could just put your <font> tag just after the <body> tag and then create paragraphs, breaks...whatever. Then at the end of your html, just before </body> make sure you end the font with </font>. From the Title's color example (be sure to View Source on this document to see the cool way I colored the Title letters with minimal tags), you can get an idea of benefits of not putting closing tags on right away, but nesting them instead. WYSIWYG (pronounced=wha-see-wig and means what you see is what you get) apps like FrontPage or Dreamweaver don't do this. That's one of the benefits of using just a plain text editor. CONTROL!!
To add more flavor to your website, you will probably want to put in pictures of somesort. Images are typically stored in JPEG (*.jpg), Graphics Interchange (*.gif), or PNG formats.
Format: For: Notes:
JPEG Photos JPG are great for supporting more colors simultaneously
background and allowing compression.
GIF animation GIF supports layers and a transparent color.
buttons
background
PNG Photos Support Transparent layer. Older browser may not support
buttons
A good rule of thumb is to size your photos at no greater than 96dpi. These aren't photos for printing (I hope) and monitors won't display that fine a detail so having the extra detail just takes up disk space and bandwidth. Also try to break large picture up into smaller ones that can be stitched together. That way, they will appear to load faster on the page as well as letting you hyperlink different spots without having to use an imagemap.
There are many packages for editing. Before you go out an buy one, be sure to see what you may already have. Linux users can use GIMP. It's free and quite powerful. PC users get the MSPaintBrush utility with Windows (any version since 3.1) Also check your office suite or other packages. Most scanners and some printers include bundled software for manipulating images.
You can also obtain free software like PaintShop Pro (trial version) that will get the job done.
Don't forget to do your homework!
Randall Perry Copyright © 2002. All rights reserved.
Revised: 04/16/02.