Your website!

We understand that a number of units and districts are setting up their own web pages.
Church Stretton's is already running (see the links page)
Girlguiding Shropshire can offer you three options which may help you.

We can put your webpage on our site, which saves you money.
If you choose to have your own separate site, we would put a link to it on our site
If you want advice, just e-mail us

If you want us to host your site, you can write it yourself (see below) or you can tell us what you want, either on paper or on computer, and we will write it for you.
However you want to do your web page, we are very willing to help you set it up. You can e-mail the webmaster for any help or advice and we can either put a link to your own site on the shropshire website, or we will host the site for you on ours.

Writing your own page

There are four parts to this section;

Information
Rules
Advice
Hints on writing your page

Information
The idea of a web page or a web site is that anyone can read it, and that everything looks as you want it to look when it's on someone elses computer. Remember not every one uses a PC or WINDOWS, and most big computers which store and transmit your pages don't use Microsoft products either.

Also Internet Explorer is not the only web browser, so you need to follow a few simple rules to make sure everyone can see your site as you want it to be seen.

To write a webpage, you can use a special program like SERIF WebPlus, or in Microsoft WORD though they can produce very complicated and slow webpages. The other option is to write your own page using the program "Notepad" which is a simple text editor that comes with WINDOWS. The last section (HINTS) shows you how to start this

Rules

All file names should be in lower case (no capitals) and should have a maximum of 8 letters plus the .htm on the end and NO SPACES
The first page in your site (your "Home Page") should be called index.htm This is because this is the file a browser looks for when it reaches a site.
Picture take up a lot of space and are slow to download. Remember not everyone has a fast Internet connection
The rules for file names apply to pictures too (.jpg and .gif)
See the notes on pictures in the Advice section

Advice

Plan your site, not just the page. If you have several pages they will need to link together, so how will it happen? Perhaps your home page needs to have a menu that you can add to as you develop.
If you use a fancy font, it will only look that way on the web page if the other person has that font too. otherwise it will probably come out in Times New Roman or Courier! In that case you will need to specify the font on your web page
Photos.
- When you put a photo or graphic in, say, WORD its file size stays the same even if you make it look smalller.
- Often you will put a "thumbnail" (a small picture that loads fast) on the page, so your visitor can click on it to see the full size version.
- If you do this you have to change the size of the picture using a photo editing program, like SERIF photoplus. Your school may well have one.
- Photos should have a "resolution" of 96dpi not the 300+ that a printer uses. A good size for a full size photo is 525 pixels high, and a thumbnail either 113 (Landscape) or 150 (Portrait) pixels. See what it looks like
Why not try writing your own page in HTML, the language computers use? It's not (that) difficult and can be fun!.
Have a look at the Hints below

Hints
Try This
Print this page. (Don't forget!)
Right click on this page.
Click on "View Source". You'll get a peculiar page appear.
Now go to "File Save" and save the file somewhere you can find it on your computer.
Close the funny page and get back to the webpage.
Now log off the Internet.
Now find the file you saved (It should be called webpg.htm) and double click on it. It should open in your web browser.
Again, right click on the page and choose "View Source". Now change the code on the source page! At the top, about 6 lines down is a line that starts BODY. Change the word lightblue at the end to yellow (leave the " "), save the file and in your browser click the refresh button. See!

It's easy to write your own page. You must start with the HTML tag (all tags are between the angle brackets) and the BODY tag. You can miss out the TITLE tag.
The / means "end" so /BODY means END of BODY. Most tags have ends.
Here is a list of the tags used on this page, and their meanings.

Start Tag	Meaning	End Tag
HTML	Hypertext Markup Language.! Don't worry just put it as your first line.	/HTML
BODY	The main part of the web page. Everything that shows.	/BODY
CENTER	Centres what follows. Note the American spelling	/CENTER
H1	Heading size 1 (big) goes to H7 (small)	/H1
B	Bold	/B
U	Underline	/U
BR	Break starts a new line. Use twice for a blank line. No /BR
UL	Unordered list. Each list item appears on a new line like a bullet	/UL
LI	List Item. Appears at the start of each item in the list	/LI
OL	Ordered list. Same as UL but numbers the List Items.	/OL
TABLE	Sets up a table. A table doesn't have to have the lines showing	/TABLE
TR	Table Row. Starts a new row. You can have as many rows as you like	/TR
TD	Table Data. An Item in the row. (Think of them as fitting in columns?)	/TD

Don't forget the /BODY and /HTML (with angle brackets) at the end of your page

To make everything look clear, switch off word wrap in Notepad and use the TAB key on the keyboard to line things up. You don't need to do this and it doesn't affect the web page but it makes life easier.

Best of Luck.
The Webmaster