Getting Started with a FDW

What makes a good pleasant website? Three main things: Good Content, Easy Navigation, and a nice Presentation.

This tutorial will explain how easy it is to create your own FreeDynamicWebsite. It only takes 10 minutes to read.

Content

No matter what your website is about, you need to start by deciding the content of your website and how you want to structure it. This simply involves making a list of the main pages of your website. So if you are making a website about yourself, you would typically list the following pages:

  • Home and News
  • About Me
  • My Photo Albums
  • Contact Me
  • My Guestbook
  • My Hobby
  • My School
  • My Town
  • My Club

Now you need to map this structure to your FreeDynamicWebsite(FDW). You have to start by creating a page for each of the items in your list. When you sign in to your FDW as administrator, you will be presented with the “Admin” menu. The first link under this menu is “Your Pages”. Click on it and you will see a table of the custom pages you currently have. Each listed page has the following properties.

  • Section - The section that this page is part of
  • Name - The unique name of this page
  • Title - The title that you want this page to have, for display purposes.
  • A/L - The Access Level of this page. You do not need to know anything about this at this stage.
  • Valid - The time period when this page will be accessible
  • Edit - Click this button to change anything about this page
  • View - Click this button to be taken to this page
  • X - Click this button if you want to completely remove this page from your website.

To start with, you are provided with one page, the “Home” page in the “Main” section. This is the entry page of your website.

So the next step is to create the rest of the pages. Click on the “Add a Page” button and you will be presented with a short form. Read the instructions there first. For your new page, you need to decide on a section, a name, and a title. So if you want to create the “About Me” page, you can select the “Main” section, type “about me” as the page name, and “About Me” as the page title. Do not worry about the access level or the validity period for now. They are automatically set for you.

Click on the “Add this Page” button at the bottom of the form. If you did everything correctly, you will get a message saying everything is ok and a link to add content to your page. Click on this link and you will be presented with another form that contains a friendly editor from where you can type the content of your page. When you are finished with typing in the content, click on the “submit changes” button at the bottom of this form. Then go back to “Your Pages”.

Congratulations, you have just created your first custom page on your FDW. You may repeat this step to create all the pages you want to. Note that you do not need to create a page for the contact form, nor the guestbook, as these pages are not custom pages and are already created for you.

The next step is: ok you created the pages, but how are your visitors going to get to them? You need to create menus with links so that your visitors can navigate through your website.

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Navigation

From the “Admin” menu, click on the “Your Menus” link. Your website comes equipped with four menu boxes, as listed in this page. Initially, only the first one is being used. Its title is “ Main ”. You have to decide which menu boxes you are going to use and what links you are going to have in them.

For example, you can decide to use two menu boxes. In the first one “ Main ”, you can place links to “Home”, “About Me”, “My Photo Albums”, “Contact Me” and “Guestbook”. And in the second menu box you can place links to “My Hobby”, “My School”, “My Town” and “My Club”.

Starting with the first menu, click on the “Edit” button of the “box1” menu. This page displays three tables. The first one on top is a form to change the details of this menu box. If you would like to change the title that appears on top of this menu box, or its validity and accessibility then use this first form.

The second table lists the links that are part of this menu box, in order of appearance. Each link has the following details:

  • Name - The words for this link, to be displayed in the menu box
  • Link - The target page where this link takes to
  • Order - The order of this link within this menu box.
  • A/L - The Access Level. You do not need to know anything about this at this stage.
  • Valid - The time period when this page will be accessible
  • Edit - Click this button to change any of the details of this link
  • X - Click this button to remove this link from this menu box

The last table in the bottom is a form to add a new link to this menu box. To add a new link to this menu box, fill in the “Title” for example “About Me”. Then you need to specify the target page where this link will take to. All the page links in your FDW will be in the following format: “Section---Page.html”.

So if you want to make this link take to your new page named “about me” in the “Main” section, then you need to specify the following as link: “ Main---About Me.html”. To define the position of this link, within this menu box, select the desired “Menu Order”. Finally click on the “Add New Item” button at the bottom of this form, to add this menu item.

Repeat this for all the links you would like to add to this menu. Remember that if you make a mistake you may also click the “Edit” button to change the details of the particular link. You may also remove a link from the menu box by clicking on the “X” button.

When you are finished defining this menu box (“box1”) you may go back to the “Your Menus” section and define the second menu box. You will be able to see the changes you make to your menus immediately as you make them. Note that a menu box with no items will be displayed and you are not required to use all 4 menu boxes.

So you have created your pages and you have defined a navigation structure. What is next? You may want to add your personal touch to how your website looks.

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Presentation

There are two main things that you can change to personalise the looks of your FDW. These are the stylesheet and the header banner.

The stylesheet defines the colors used in your website. From the “Admin” menu, click on “Styles and Colors”. You will be shown a table listing all the available stylesheets and the following three buttons for each one:

  • Test - Click this button to test this stylesheet. A new window will open using the tested stylesheet.
  • Edit - Click this button to change anything to this stylesheet.
  • Set - Click this button to set this stylesheet as the one to be used for your website.
  • Remove - Click this button to delete a stylesheet from your website.

To create your own stylesheet, click on the “Create Stylesheet” button at the top of this page. You will be presented with the stylesheet generator form. Read the instructions at the top and then start filling the form. There are many different options to whic you can set the colors. Note that not everything has to have a different color. You can set some things to have the same color. Especially if it is your first time creating colors for a website, keep it simple and do not use many different colours.

Once you have filled in this form correctly, click on the “Generate This Stylesheet” button at the bottom of the form. You should get a message saying that your stylesheet was generated. You will also be presented with a link to test this stylesheet that when clicked, will open a new browser window previewing your website in the stylesheet that you just created. See what you like and what you don’t.. Then go back to the browser window with the stylesheet generator form and improve on it, until you are happy with it.

REMEMBER that once you are happy with the stylesheet you created, you will need to set it as the main default one for your website. Do this by going to the "Styles and Colors" page and click on the corresponding "Set" button.

Note that the stylsheet defines just the default color scheme. However you may always decide which colors to use in a particular page by formatting it using the “edit page” editor. The same goes for the header banner as follows.

You may customize the header banner as you wish by clicking the “Your Header / Banner” link from the “Admin” menu. You will get a form with an easy to use editor so that you can change how your banner header looks like. You may also insert images in the banner.

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So now you should find it easy to get started with customising your own FDW in terms of content, navigation and presentation. For more information on how to do other things such as creating photo albums and managing your guestbook please visit the FAQ section.

Last modified - 2006-02-22 00:58:09