First off, lets give you some tools that will allow you to change these Templates to suit your own color schemes and motifs.

Hex Pickers

A Hex Picker is a program, that when you to click on a color from a palette, it returns or displays the color's Hexadecimal Value. These values are used in your 'HTML Body Script' which defines what your Page Background, Body Text, and Links Texts colors will be.

Please feel free to use COLOR CENTER .
COLOR CENTER is an interactive website that allows you to pick the colors for all of your web page attributes and see what the combination looks like. COLOR CENTER also includes links to ClipArt and Background Texture Libraries.

If you are using a Macintosh, feel free to download a copy of ColorHex - a stand alone HyperCard based Hex Picker.

ClipLines

Use my personal library of clip art ruled lines (page dividers). Just offload a copy, of the one(s) you like, to your site development file and substitute the image's file name into the template.

Templates

The included Templates are easy to use.

1. Selecting your Target Directory

   In your Browser, under Options, select General Preferences.

   Select Applications

   Use the Browse button, where it says Download Directory, to point to the directory that you want to place a copy of the Template in to.

   Click on Apply then OK at the bottom of the Menu.

2. Downloading a Template

   Browse to the Template page that you would like to use.

   In your Browser select View then Document Source.

   You should now have a copy, saved as a Text File, of the selected Template.

This process may differ slightly depending on the Browser that you are using, but it is very similar. We use Netscape Navigator to build our WebPages and then check for compatibility on Microsoft Explorer when they are complete.

Catalog Organization

The development of a Multi-Level Product Catalog can be very confusing. The process is one of a Conceptual Hierarchy. Each Main Category is contained within its own Folder or Directory. Each subsequent Subcategory or group of specifically similar items is contained with in its own folder or directory which resides with in the main category's folder or directory. And so on.

This process allows one to keep track of the location of a specific file and makes it easy to do maintenance, on your WebSite, in the server. We have seen WebSites where all files have been heaped in to one 'Public HTML' or 'WWW' server file. With more than 250 files stuffed into one folder, it made it very difficult to find, delete, and upload a new copy of a file. Also, remember that each graphic that you use is a separate file, and the more you use, the more complex your file content is going to get.

Life becomes easier during your site maintenance process. Using the example below, a price change in the Rebock file is easy. Using your FTP program and targeting publichtml or WWW/mensshop/shoes/sneakers/rebock/, will bring you right into the Rebock folder.

This Simple Example Might Help

We place a copy of each reoccurring file in each folder. i.e. - graphics, ruled lines, logos. This makes each folder a kind of mini, self contained, website.

A Couple of Simple Rules

1. The name of the first or 'linked to' document of each folder should be named 'index.html'.
   i.e.,(from example)
   • mensshop/index.html
   • mensshop/shoes/index.html
   • mensshop/shoes/sneakers/index.html
   • mensshop/shoes/sneakers/rebock/index.html

   When you make an on-line request, a server goes and looks for the file through the hierarchy. If the specific file name is not given, i.e., www.yourname.com/mensshop/otherstuff.html, as in, i.e., www.yourname.com/mensshop/, the server looks for the Index for that folder. If the server can not find an 'index.html' then it will return the FTP directory for that file. You don't want that to happen. You want a page to load.

2. On Return Links (links back to previous pages) make sure to keep track of how deep into the hierarchy you get. For each folder that you want to back out of you have to use a../. i.e., If you wanted to return to the 'Men Shop' page from the 'Rebock' page, the link code would look like this (="../../../index.html")

Images

For a long vertical row of images we use images of 75 pixels wide (the length will vary)

For '6 Product Catalog Pages' we use images of 75 or 100 pixels wide for tall items and 150 pixels wide for wide items (the lengths will vary)

Description Pages with tall items use 250 pixel wide images. (the length will vary)

Description Pages with wide items use 350 pixel wide images. (the length will vary)

The instructions for Editing Your Templates.