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Dealing with Dummies

Dealing with Dummies


To get a visual idea of your site, go to the Site Window, and click on the Site tab. This window displays each page as an icon, drawing arrows between interlinked pages. You’ll get a clear understanding of the relationships between pages, which becomes very useful as your site grows more unwieldy.

Right now, all I have is index.html, but I can use this window as a sketching tool to create dummy pages that I’ll later fill with content. To do this, click in the Site View of the Site Window. Notice that the Inspector becomes the Site View Controller. Make sure that the Navigation Hierarchy button is selected (Link Hierarchy shows what pages are linked to what, but that’s not much use to me at this point).

Then, as you mouse over the index.html icon in the Site Window, a smaller square icon fades in beneath it. Clicking on that will create a new blank HTML file, which you can name whatever you want. That resulting file will then get its own icon, connected to its mama by a greenish arrow (greenish means there’s a navigational relationship between the two documents; blue means there’s an actual link in existence that leads from one to the other – these colors are, of course, tweakable, like most everything in this program). You can keep working in this way to pull all of the pages you’ll need out of thin air, then reorganize them in a way that makes sense to you.

Site Heirarchy

After fiddling around for a little while, I’ve decided my site is going to be pretty small. Naturally, I’ll include the obligatory splash page that leads users to the site. The main page will be split up with frames: a title bar up top, navigational bar on the left, and content on the right. Such mad innovation! The content will be broken down into four sections: News, Biography, Discography, and Media. Simple enough. So, using the Site Window, I’ve made and named all of the HTML files that I will need and I’ve seen how all of the pages will interrelate.

But these are just blank files. Now I need to fill them up with something.

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