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Thu 2:45 PM |  |
Spotlight
| iWebFAQ | Comics | Forum | 19 Comments | Tell A Friend | iWebSites |
Here is where a featured iWeb site will be listed every month. Sites are chosen as featured because of their individuality and creativity as well as for their attempts in making their sites look like they're not created with iWeb. Sites are chosen from the list of iWeb-created sites listed on iWebFAQ.com/iwebsites so make sure your site is listed if you want to be considered a feature on iWebFAQ.com. The site of the month for January 2009 is StopSuctionEntrapment.com
EditHTML
html is made up of "tags" and in-between "tags" something happens, be it a image is displayed, a style is defined, a link is available, or a combination of all.
There's two parts to an html tag. the first part of an html tag begins with a beginning tag mark "<" and ends with an closing tag mark ">" then something is displayed, and the second part of the tag is almost the same as the first where it begins with a tag mark but then has a slash afterwards like this "</" then the tag name, then the closing tag character ">"
An example of a complete tag would look like this:
<div>something is seen here </div>
"Tags" and be inside of other "tags" referred to as nesting. For instance an html file is made up of a <BODY> section and inside the <BODY> there's <DIV> tags that define divded areas where content and style are defined.
Almost everything "extra" that you want in iWeb requires HTML editing after you Publish. In order to Edit your HTML files you have to open them in a Text Editing program. When you Publish from iWeb the HTML files for your pages are kind of hard to find and organize unless you really know what you're doing. Some have made a habit of using certain iWeb Publishing strategies in order to have better orgainization of their website files when editing them and placing them on their host. Examples of a few strategies include creating one Domain file for every page they create from iWeb in an effort to drop the .html from the end of their URL or using iwebextender to reorgainize the html files after Publishing.
For this tutorial we are going to use the iwebextender method but the concept is the same.
When you Publish to a Folder from iWeb your site is located in a folder with a cluster of a mess of folders and files all inside of that. This is when you need to open up iwebextender and start trimming down your files and folders so they are easier to find and edit. From iWeb Extender choose your Website Folder. Then Choose a new destination for your site. You can create a new folder from here if you wish. Mark all the checkmark options to flatten your site and remove any duplicate files. You can even have iwebextender insert your Favicon if you've already created a favicon.ico image.
After you've processed your site through iwebextender your site will have one folder with the name of your site and inside of that you will have an html file for every one of your pages and a folder with all of your files.
Now you can easily find the HTML file for the page you need to edit the code on. In order to do that you need to select the file and control-click on the file. Select "Open With..." from the contextual menu and from there select the application "Text Edit".
If the HTML file doesn't open as a text document you need to go to Text Edit/Preferences... and from the "Open and Save" tab under the "When opening a file" section check the option for "Ignore rich text commands in HTML files"
When you open the HTML file as a text document, it is like looking at the DNA of your webpage. You can scroll through the code and locate certain areas and links that you might want to edit. If you've created a text box in iWeb with something like "CODEGOESHERE" then it will be easier to find in the mess of code in the html file. The manual process involves scrolling through the sea of HTML code and replacing the codes with what you'd like. There are search and replace methods as well such as MassReplaceIt. iwebextender even has a search and replace reature in its application, but on more occations than not we have heard of more problems using these features compared to manually inserting the html codes. It also seems easier to understand the HTML code as a whole when you form the habit of inserting the codes by hand.
iWeb '08 makes it easy to add html in a snippet but there are some times where you need to add things in the <HEAD> section and that's pretty much the only time you'd need to edit your html files using iWeb '08