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Exploring your template will help you familiarize yourself with layouts
and pages that are currently available to you. It may even give you
ideas that will help you make your site grow. You do not need to use
all the pages immediately and will learn in the next section how to move
or remove these pages.
 Extensions
& Default Pages: (see image on left)
Start with the index.html - The reason the extension for this is
.html is because most servers use index.html as the "default page" also
known as the "home page". On some rare occasions they use default.html
or welcome.html you will know for sure when you set up your account on
the server. They will instruct you on what the default page should be.
In our templates, it will always be index.html.
Even though there is really no difference between .htm and .html we
do not recommend using .html extensions because 9 out of 10 people will
automatically type in .htm and not .html.
Weird File Names: (see image on left)
In some templates you will see weird files such as: menu.js or
changingthedropdownmenu.txt. These are Java Script files and Help Files!
Occasionally you will edit the .js files, but ONLY when you are
instructed to. Changing .js files when you do not know what to do will
cause your website to break. The .txt files will help you with specific
template functions. There is a readme.txt to help you get started and
the changingthedropdownmenu.txt to help you learn how to change your
drop down menu (should your template contain this feature).
Folders: (see image below)
You will see folders in your template such as: images, styles,
includes (some templates), and _private. The _private folder is not for
you to mess with. This is something Microsoft programs put into their
web's. The image folder is exactly what it sounds like, the image
directory.
To view the "Folder List" as you see below isn't always showing when
you open FrontPage or Expression Web. If you do not see it (like shown
in the image below) you just click View-Folder List or Alt-F1...
The include folder (if your template contains this) is again, exactly
what it sounds like, it will contain your include pages. If you do not
have an include folder, we highly recommend creating your own and
putting those files into there. The reason being is simply helping keep
your files organized and easy to follow. The more pages you add in the
harder it is to keep up with. (not shown in image)
The "unused" folder is a folder that I include for a different reason
you will learn at a later time, this will not be included with your
template.
Lastly there is a folder called style. This folder is to help keep
all your .css files in one place and easy to manage. You can use dozens
of .css files in your website, so try and keep them in one place and
named easily so that you can call on any style sheet you need at any
time.
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