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Lazy Webmasters never do for themselves what they can sweet talk
someone else into doing for free. There are many Web sites that offer online
automation. You fill out a form or swish around a few scrollbars and all
the hard work is done for you. With all the time you save you can smell
the roses. Take a nap. Read a novel. Write a column for this magazine.
Build a dropdown menu
DiscoveryVIP’s online generator for building dropdown menu creates an attractive sitemap, colored to match your site. discoveryvip.com. How easy is it? Fill out the form and you get four images and the HTML code to place into your page. One thing not made clear in the instructions: the style type code needs to be nested in the <HEAD> tag. The rest of the code is placed where you want the dropdown box to appear. The code itself is simple, and if you want to add or delete links later it’s easy to mimic the formatting of the link entries. The menu will expand or contract to fit the size of your categories.
Meta Tag generator
Meta tags provide administrative information to the Internet. The most important are description and keywords, which give information to search engines to help them find, categorize and prioritize your site. Although only about one in four Websites uses them, they are worth the effort. Submit Corner has an online form that you fill out and then copy and paste the resulting code into your own HTML file. Insert the META tags after your </TITLE> and before your </HEAD> tags.
Create a color scheme
Color is subtle. Complementary colors. Analogous colors. Do you have a color wheel? Know how to use it? The color picker makes selecting attractive color combinations easy. Use it at boogiejack.com. Click on a color and the schemer will select 16 colors that look good with it. The RGB and hex codes are provided. The online utility is based on a much more robust program, Color Schemer, available for download . You get a 15 day trial or you can buy it for $25.
Create new colors
There are 216 Web safe colors that will always display correctly in a Web browser. You can view the options at visibone.com. They can be boring, or clash with your logo. A work-around is to create a color swatch that contains two or three dithered colors. The eye blends, or dithers, the pixels and displays what looks like could take hours. Color Mix will do it for you. Pick a color from the true color cube and two or three colors are mixed on the screen. Save your swatch. You can use it as a background tile on your Web site or as a flood fill color in your graphics program. There is also a free software version you can download.
Make frames
I am ambivalent about frames. They are used on the Alamo PC site and make updates to the navigation bar easy. Make one change and all of the pages instantly get the new information. But people find them confusing. If you save a framed page as a bookmark or favorite place, it saves the container page, not the frame. (I know you can right-click on a frame and bookmark it, but 99% of Web users don’t know that trick.) Search engines list frame URLs separately, and people end up viewing it separated from its accompanying frames. If you do want frames, an online utility can create the code for you. The Frame Shop is one of the few online frame makers that lets you make more than a two-frame container.
Generate tables
Creating the code for complicated tables can be tedious when done by hand. The iWeb Toolkit creates tables using CSS (.Cascading Style Sheets) You will get cut-and-paste tags. All you do is add the content.
Check screen resolutions
One of the basic principles of Web design is to check your site at different resolutions to make sure it behaves as well at 640x480 as it does at 1600x1200. Talk about tedious! It involves going to the control panel and changing the screen display at least five times. Do it once for Internet Explorer and again for Netscape Navigator. Size-o-matic is a small (500KB) utility that makes this easy The toolbar floats on your screen. Just drag a resolution onto your site and the data regroups to that resolution. Click and it reverts to normal. This simulation lets you check your site without the hassle of actually changing your screen resolution.
Make buttons
Attractive navigation buttons can make or break a site. The fancy ones are hard to customize. You can add text to a clipart button but you can’t resize it. And getting everything aligned right is a major pain. Cool Archives Button Maker automates buttons. There are 30 buttons to chose from – you can change the color and font, even pick a background color. The button resizes to fit the size of the text.
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