TOOLS AND TIPS FOR BUILDING YOUR WEB SITE
Free Software, Bars, Buttons, GIFS, Backgrounds And
Animated Graphics You Can Use
By Ralph Thomas


In some past articles, I covered some major tips on getting a web page designed. In this issue, I'd like to cover this subject a little more indepth.



SOFTWARE TOOLS
"They are getting better and better and easier to use"
Animated GIF above by: Web Promotion: http://www.webpromotion.com

If you are considering web design software, look for the following features:

WHAT IS WYSIWYG
I like what is commonly referred to WYSIWYG software (What You See Is What You Get). If you create a web page in raw HTML coding, it's both time consuming and you don't know what you have until you test it in a a web browser. However, more and more, we are seeing push-button HTML creation software that creates the raw HTML code in the background and shows you what the page looks like on a web browser in your page design software.

WYSIWYG features can be used for text formatting which makes text creation work much like a simple word processor program. It can also be used for graphics and tables.

WHAT IS DRAG AND DROP
Drag And Drop features in software means you don't have to hand create links. You just highlight the text you want to show as a link and then either drop the page onto the selected text you want to link to or (in the case of a remote site when you are creating web pages off line) you get a dialog box in which you simply type the URL code into. Drag and drop features in software can be used for both graphics and texts. It gives you the ability to drag and drop graphics into your web page giving you instant WYSIWYG

SOTWARE TOOLS YOU CAN GET NOW

ADOBE
Adobe has become the software development company to watch. Their PageMill and SiteMill software is completely drag and drop WYSIWYG. The current version doesn't support tables and doesn't support Windows platforms but they are getting ready to release version 2.0 which will support tables, have a spelling checker and supports Windows platforms. They also have another program called Web Presenter which can be downloaded free. Check out their www pages at http://www.adobe.com.

NETSCAPE GOLD 3.0
It's out, it's great and it can be used for web authoring. Netscape Gold 3.0 is giving Adobe's PageMill a real run for their money. Although it doesn't have complete drag and drop features yet, it supports tables and supports VRML if you are interested in 3-D. Check it out at: http://www.netscape.com. You CAN download it for free in a BETA testing mode. If you use it, register it!

BACKGROUNDS
We at NAIS have done a great deal of experimenting with seamless background tiles.AS most people know, the trick to good web page design is to get your graphics to a reasonable size so they will download quickly. When it comes to backgrounds, web tiles are the thing to use. A web tile is simply a small graphic that keeps repeating itself in the background of your page that shows no seams. They are easy to use. Watch dark backgrounds as they make your pages hard to read. If you want some very go free backgrounds for your web pages, go to: http://the-tech.mit.edu/KPT/ which is a site maintained by Kai's Power Tools.

If you use Netscape 2.0 or above, you can easily capture backgrounds from any web page. Simply look at the source code and note the file name of the background then open that GIF or JPEG file with your web browser. Now just save the graphics to your computer.

One place to find very good backgrounds is:
http://the-tech.mit.edu/KPT/bgs.html

GRAPHICS
When you add graphics to your pages, you want to do several things. The first, of course, is use color graphics. The second point is that you need to keep those color graphics small in size so they download easy. I usually convert the number of colors or bits to a resolution of 72 (or even lower if I can get away with it). You'll also want to make your graphics interlaced. An Interlaced graphic means that the graphics doesn't download from top to bottom on the web page. It first produces a low resolution graphics of the complete subject and then gradually resolves itself. Using interlaced graphics makes pages load quicker. There is much controversy over rather you should use GIF files or JPEG files, I'm not going to get into that except to say that JPEG files offer a great deal more compression.

We at the NAIS office use Photoshop 3.0 for our main graphics support. It's an Adobe product (a little on the pricey side) but it will do everything you want it to do. You can increase or decrease file size, colors and bits, make all kinds of light, contrast, dithering and special effects adjustments and convert graphics files to just about any format. It's a very powerful program. For more information on Photoshop, go to Adobe's web page: http://www.adobe.com.



ANIMATED GRAPHICS/INTERLACED MOVING GRAPHICS
Here's a little trick I learned from the program developer of NCI, Mark Hanna. Interlaced moving graphics are really three <or more> graphics overlayed into one graphics file. You have three <or more> frames within the graphics file which, when they download, keep repeating themselves giving you an effect of moving graphics.If you check out many of the new pages at the NAIS site, you'll notice a lots of them which adds movement to your web pages. If you download these and open them in Netscape, you'll see that they move. You don't have to do anything to them. There are tons of free public animated graphics you can get from various places on the web and shareware software you can obtain to develop these yourself. Just use the Yahoo search engine use the keyword search: ANIMATED GIF and you'll get lots of information on them and public clip art you can use.

Two of the top sites for animated gifs is:

DEEDEE'S PLACE
http://www.NorCom.mb.ca/deedee/animat.htm
DeeDee's place has some animated public graphics you can download and use as well as links to other such sites.

ROSE'S PLACE
http://www.netusa.net/~rose/animate1.html
Rose's Place is one of the best sites I have found on the net with one of the better and larger collections of animated GIF graphics. You'll also find an extensive selection of backgrounds, buttons and bars and it's all for free.



3-D DESIGN
Totally 3-D is the future of web pages. As ISDN and Cable band width become common place, you'll see more and more 3-D virtual walk through web sites, more and more video, and more and move moving graphics. Although the band width for 28.8 bps speed is, for the most part, not up to speed on a great deal of this stuff, it soon will be and now is the time to learn how to develop those high impact features in your web site.

3-D design gives you the ability to have virtual walk-through worlds, as well as graphics and text that will spin around and logos that move.

Here are some tools and suggestions for getting started with 3-D.

TEACH YOURSELF JAVA IN 21 DAYS: Available for both Macintosh and Windows from Hayden Books. It comes with a CD-Rom with sample Applets. (Applets are little programs that make things move on your web page which is what JAVA is all about. For a nice JAVA web site on this stuff try: <http://java.sun.com/new.html>


VRML TOOL KIT
VRML is an important development in the evolution of the Internet. It stands for Virtual Reality Modeling Language. It gives you the ability to have moving 3-D graphics on your web pages and gives you the ability to create 3-D worlds on a computer screen. 3-D techniques are the same techniques used by computer accident reconstruction experts which is something that is appearing in the court room these days. <see pervious article on this in last year's PI Magazine or check the article posted to the NAIS web page at <http://www.pimall.com/nais/n.reenact.html> A great deal of these programs are becoming very easy to use with drag and drop easy creation. You can obtain VRML software which is shareware at the following web site: <http://www.virtus.com.>



ADDDEPTH
AddDepth is a little 3-D software program that is very powerful for creating 3-D type from Ray Dream.You'll find clip-art type 3-D designs you can use or modify by simply inserting the type you want in them which gives you very nice 3-D logos.

INDEXING YOUR WEB PAGES ON SEARCH ENGINES: As Joseph Seanor covered at he recent NAIS Conference in Austin, Texas, one of the best things you can do to get your web pages indexed in all the search engines is to add what is called a METTA CODE to the top of your web pages. A Metta Code is a kind of indexing code so when spider webs and web crawlers come through your page, they will capture the key word indexing you have placed in the HTML Metta Code. Spider webs and web crawlers are little programs that search the world wide web looking for Meta codes and then copy your key word index and automatically add this to the search engines.

You can also do some hand indexing yourself which I have found quite helpful. On almost every major search engine, you'll find a SUBMIT URL button. Just hit the button and follow the instructions. There is an all-in-one web page indexing site that lets you submit your web pages to about twenty major search engines at: http://www.submit-it.com. Give it a try.

NOT BEING ON THE WEB is going to become like not having a business card in the very near future. It's going to become an absolute must to have a web page and the opportunity from this new type of marketing is very high. Web page marketing is inexpensive and reaches a world wide market.



IF YOU WOULD RATHER LEAVE WEB PAGE DESIGN TO SOMEONE ELSE
Thomas Investigative Publications is keeping on the cutting edge of web page design. We specialize in the development and creation of high quality web pages. If you want to see what we have done, just point your web browser to: http://www.pimall.com/nais/home.html and take a look. Web page design starts at $360.00 for a basic page. To contact Thomas Investigative Publications, call 512-719-3595 or e mail at RThomas007@aol.com. You can also get a web page inside the PI Mall if you are an NAIS member for half price and have the PI Mall design your web page for you. The PI Mall can be researched at: 703-780-9033 or by e mailing to CIBIR@netcom.com

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