IMS Web Engine and IMS Web Spinner include a Page Editor.
Setting the components of a Web Page is something that most
of us do not often do. Most of our time is spent on the
actual page content and design. It is consequently easy to
forget about many of the operations that can be, and should
be performed before the web page is actually published.
The Page Editor is comprised of four dialogs. The first
dialog allows you to select the current page and to change
its name and extension. The default "Page1.htm" will work
but it hardly tells anyone what the page is about. More
importantly, most web sites require a home page called
"index.htm", "default.htm" or something like it. Since the
name can also be changed on the page Toolbar, It is the
other 3 dialogs that provide the more interesting and unique
features.
The Title dialog is the most valuable but probably the
easiest to overlook since it does not add anything to the
Page design. The title dialog however, provides the tools to
allow your web page to be better indexed by the major search
engines. In addition to a title, you can set the page Meta
Tags. These include a Meta Description, Meta Keywords and a
Copyright notice. The title dialog also allows you to set a
custom Meta Tag.
How should the Title Meta Tags be used? Simple. Enter an
appropriate title into the Title edit box, a brief
description into the Meta Description box and a list of
Keywords into the Met keyword box. When you Publish or
Preview your project, you can see the Meta Tags at the top
of the HTML page when you use the Browser 'View Source'
command. For more detailed information take a look at our
past article on Meta Tags: issue38top2.htm
The 3rd dialog is titled Links. It provides the ability to
dynamically link to another page and to change the color of
the visited, unvisited and active links on your page.
Although a dynamic link can be extremely useful in some
circumstances, you should be cautioned to avoid using a zero
timed link. This will make it difficult or impossible for a
user to use their Back button to return to a previous page.
Many search engines and users consider this a form of Spam.
The final dialog is titled Special Effects and provides the
most esoteric Page Setup capabilities. These include the
ability to change the animation rate in IMS Web Engine or to
create special page effects such as Fixed Backgrounds,
Dynamic Scrolling, Fade Ins, Fade Outs and many other
transition Effects.
As many of you know, IMS Web Engines provides interactive
animation capabilities through the use of Dynamic HTML. If
you have ever viewed complex DHTML on different systems with
different Browsers, you will have noticed that not all
systems are created equal. A recent Pentium III running IE 5
will perform significantly faster than a Pentium 60 running
Netscape 4. In an attempt to equalize the performance on
these different systems, the IMS Web Engine DHTML code will
do a performance check on a visitor's machine and adjust the
DHTML so that its animation is approximately equivalent
across different platforms.
The Animation Frame Rate slider allows you to adjust this
rate. When the Dynamic Rate box is unchecked, it will allow
the visitors machine to play your animated Web Page at its
peak performance. You can adjust this with the slider but
keep in mind that this may appear significantly faster on
some systems than on others. On faster machines however, the
animation will appear smother.
The final set of options provides the ability to display
special effects. An example of many of these effects was
published in a recent article: issue26top1.htm . Keep in mind
that many of these effects are dependent upon the visitor's
Browser.
Version 2 when it becomes available will include several
additional capabilities from within the Page Editor. I will
discuss them in a future newsletter.
"IMS Web Tips" is a weekly news letter for all web site managers regardless of experience who are looking for detailed information on creating, maintaining and promoting their web sites.
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