Create Your Other Website Pages

If you only want one page in your website, you can skip this part.

This template page will be used as the basis for all the pages you create next. So it should contain just the features that will be common to all pages...

Once you are happy with the appearance of your home page, make a copy of it called something like template.html. It's important you make a copy before you start to change it - you don't want to lose all your hard work!:

i.e. Save index.htm as tmplt.htm

Now go through the page and remove all the content. i.e. remove all the text and formatting which is not going to be on every page, and leave whatever is. This makes adding the content for your other pages much easier.

Once all the content has been removed, re-save tmplt.htm

Save tmplt.htm as tmplt2.htm - just in case you need a backup.

To create the rest of your website, open and rename the template file to create each page, then add your content and re-save it.

For example:

• Open and save tmplt.html as catalog.php in your web directory.
• Cut the products table from the example page, and paste it in.
• Add your list of products to catalog.php, putting an image in the first column of the products table if you have one.
• Add any other info - ordering shipping etc.
• Save your catalog page.

You can create any page from the template, just copy it to the new name, and then add your content.

A Note On Naming Your Files! Apart from your home page which should be called index.php, your other pages can be called whatever you like... It's a good idea to include the page's keywords in it's filename. Separate the words with '-' dashes - it helps improve the page's search engine 'relevance' and therefore ranking! I suggest you name all your webpages with a .php extension because this means you can embed PHP (programming language) commands into these pages. You'll use this ability to dynamic features to your webpages later!

• Adding any other files.
  
  If you have any other files that need to be included in your website - i.e. a zip file for download, maybe product data in PDF files, then these should be added to your local web directory now. All the files in your website will be uploaded in one go from this directory.
  
  You could put files for download into a sub-directory off your web directory (i.e. yourdomain.com/download). Opinion is split over whether it better to put things in one directory or many. I prefer a few different directories to keep the clutter down
  
  
  
• Backing Up.
  
  This is an essential part of any development... If you have a backup device like a CDRW/zip drive - use it. Otherwise you can always backup your files to your webhost! (Once you have it, you're paying for that disk space, why not?)...
  
  Your web pages themselves will be stored at your webhost, so are effectively backed up (although this is fairly public, and arguably not as safe as a local disk). You can create a private directory and store other files there too. Either:
  
  
  • Create a directory from your home directory (i.e. /username/backup). This directory, being below the publicly visible www (or 'public_html' or whatever) directory, is not visible to the web.


  • Create a directory /username/www/backup, which is visible to the web, but password protect it. Details of how to password protect a directory are in a later lesson.