Guidance for creating and editing website pages

Lesson 7 - Local and server publishing

Both Lesson 1 and Lesson 6 give details of how to structure a folder system for maintaining, developing and publishing for a website such as this one.

A simple starter system on a home computer or laptop has a top-level 'Website' folder which will contain further folders. The structure will look like this:

Documents > My Documents > Website > images > (with sub-folders as needed).

(In Win 7 - other Windows operating systems are similar)

This folder structure will be suitable for anyone creating new pages for the BRT website. Further folders can be added when needed.

The structure is suitable for testing, review and local publishing prior to uploading these files to the website server.

There are just a few other files that are needed for proper display of pages as intended.

These are namely:

These files can be obtained by CLICKING THIS LINK.

Simply unzip these files and transfer them to your main 'images' folder.

As previously mentioned in Lesson 1: Basic principles, a copy of the CSS style sheet 'inland.css' needs to be placed in the 'Website' folder.

It can be downloaded from the website server - it will arrive in the form of a web page - simply open up your browser options tab and 'Save Page As', then place it directly into the 'Website' folder.

CSS 3.0 style sheet - inland.css

Also to be included in this folder is an initial 'template' web page in the form of a HTML file. This can be copied and renamed as needed. It can be downloaded here - 'Save Page As' again:

BRT WEB-PAGE TEMPLATE

Simply place it, along with the CSS style sheet, in the main 'Website' folder.

ALL new BRT web pages now need placing into this main 'Website' folder.

One last file that is needed is the small BRT Logo found at the top left-hand corner of every BRT web page. This can be obtained by simply clicking on it below and 'Save Image As' to your computer:

You will need to create a new folder inside the 'images' folder to contain this; name this new folder 'logos'.

You should now be fully equipped to create and publish new web pages with embedded images.

The Website Server

The BRT website is already quite extensive. Its folder system is much more complex than the above one. In reality, the top-level naming convention is slightly different, but this makes no practical difference. There currently exist 35 different images folders, all appropriately named. It also contains the five small files listed above.

The webmaster's 'master' copy of the 'images' folder is shown below:

The Server Interface

The website server upload interface looks like this. It cannot be accessed without the correct log-in details. When first accessed only two buttons are active. These are 'New Folder' and 'Upload'. A pop-up window will allow you to navigate to the files saved on your own machine to upload them:

The file structure can be seen in the left-hand sidebar, whilst details of the contained files are shown to the right. Simply click to navigate to the folder you need to place your image files into using the left window. All new or updated web pages are directly uploaded at this top-level entry point, otherwise simply identified as '/'.

Here endeth the seventh and penultimate lesson in web page production!

Go to the Lesson 8 page - Other tools, tips and tricks

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