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How To Create A Website Template
Pages In The Template
Tutorial
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On the following pages you'll learn how to create a website
template with
a step by step tutorial.
You'll
be able to easily customize the colors and styles to suit yourself, and
you'll get the knowledge you need to make your own custom web site
template. Then when you build a web page
all
you have to do is plug in the content, the page title,
description, and keywords.
What You Need In A Template
If
you have a five page website, making changes to every page isn't too
bad. If you had 50 pages and you decided you didn't like the headline
size
and colors you'd have to think twice about changing them. It would be a
mammoth task. What if you had 250 pages?
Or what if you wanted to put a notice on every one of those pages?
"5 Day Sale, 25% off Everything!"
It is
possible to make those changes easily, and a good template will
let you do that.
Here is some things that I find useful when I create a website template.
- Easy to change the navbar (essential)
- Website navigation is easy and intuitive
- Easy to change fonts (color, size, style) for
headlines and body text
- Easy to change page colors
- Easy to change the header graphic
- Easy to add an ad, notice etc to every page
- Easy to change the footer
Using Style Sheets To Build Your Template
There are a couple of ways to create a website template. The
more sophisticated way is to use CSS
(Cascading Style Sheets) to lay everything out, but that is really for
experienced web designers. There are still issues with web browser
compatibility with CSS too. The latest browsers are pretty good, but
there are still people using old browsers that can't use all the CSS
commands.
I don't layout web pages with CSS, but my wife is a
computer programmer, and she does. I think using CSS for the layout is
too complicated for someone new to web design who just wants
to get their business
on the net.
Using Tables To Create A Template
The other
way to lay out web pages is to use HTML tables, and that is very
common. Creating a website template using tables is well within the
capabilities of a beginner web site builder.
Use A Combination Of HTML Tables and CSS
I
prefer to get the best of both worlds and use a combination of CSS,
HTML tables and virtual
includes. It's a bit more complicated than plain HTML tables,
but
it is so
easy to update and make changes to all your pages at once that it is
well worth the extra effort.
The CSS can let you change
font styles, font size, color etc, plus background colors, table
colors, whether the table is centered or not, and a
lot more.
With
virtual includes you change the navbar, the header and the footer on
every page
easily, plus easily add an ad or notice or whatever on every page.
Web Page Software For This Tutorial
There is a lot of software you can use to create a web page template,
from writing the code yourself with a text editor like WordPad, to
buying an expensive high end program like Dreamweaver.
For this tutorial I'm using KompoZer, a free
wysiwyg web page editor, so anyone can download the software, copy
exactly what I'm doing, and learn enough to modify the template to suit
themselves. KompoZer has a built in CSS editor, and is quite good
enough to build a complete website.
If you use
other software, the actual commands will be different but the concept
will be the same, so you'll still get a lot from this web template
tutorial.
Next page: Making
the HTML table layout
Return from How To Create A Website Template
to Building A Website home
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