Basic Coding Elements
It is assumed that you already have either a sound knowledge of HTML or a beginner's knowledge coupled with experience using FrontPage or another HTML editor. If you are a novice try the List of Helpful Web Sites for Beginners, or contact the Training Team to see what Frontpage classes are available.You probably know the basic Visual Features of the template by now. Let's now go behind the scenes and consider the coding elements for the template:
The Include Files
These are the bones of the ASP coding, covered in detail below. They look like this:
<!--#INCLUDE VIRTUAL="/incs/topbar.htm"-->
This is the include file for the top navigation bar on most of the business school web pages. Instead of each page containing the code for the
navigation bars, the ASP code inserts the top navigation bar, left navigation
and the footer. This makes it very easy to update elements that appear throughout the whole site or throughout
your subweb by changing a single page.
Dimensions
The dimensions of the different areas in the template are very specific and, in
order to maintain consistency, should not be altered. The structure of the
design has been carefully constructed and tested, and was chosen as the best method for creating a consistent clean layout on all browsers and platforms.
Please do not randomly alter the dimensions and thus create non-standard pages. They may look okay to you on your particular computer and browser, but we have coded the template to look uniform on different operating systems and browsers.
Consistency of Fonts and Colors
The web committee decided early on that the entire site should commit to uniform
font standards. Fortunately, since all standardized sites link to the school-wide style sheets,
(explained on the
Basics of CSS page), font standards are easy.
As each section of the template already has its font color and style specified, you do not and should not need to define any font styles or color.
If you are pasting text into your webpage from another program (ex: from an email or a Word document), you will need to "strip" the text to remove the coding from it. This is necessary both to keep your webpage light, to allow for easy changes, and to maintain a consistent look. See instructions on a simple way to strip coding from text.
