Just as a book is meaningless without pages, so are a SiteSpinner™ project or a published web site. When visitors connect to your web site, it isn’t the web site itself that they connect to – it’s one of its pages. Similarly, your web site could boast the most killer multimedia, graphical, or application content on the Internet, but visitors would never see it – because there would be no place to reference it from – if there were no pages.
When we discuss pages in SiteSpinner™, we are talking about one of two things. First are the pages of your project file. These are the drawing boards on which you add and position text, geometry, image, and other objects. The individual, unpublished pages of your SiteSpinner™ project are maintained and organized internally by the application code. They are not visible as separate entities, except through the page selection commands that make them appear, one at a time, in the Work Window.
The second type of pages are the finished web pages that are given life after you complete your project design, and issue the Publish command, which converts your raw project pages to either an HTML or SVG format. These are the pages that you would ordinarily transfer to a web server and make available on the World Wide Web.
If you have published in the HTML format, web pages will have HTML file extensions, although you may assign them alternate file extensions to suit the type of web server you are publishing to, such as .ASP, .CGI, or .PHP. (For more information, see Publisher Dialog Box.) If you are publishing SVG web pages, they will have .SVG extensions. In any case, a web page file name and extension is the last part of the URL web address that your visitors’ browsers look up in order to navigate to your web site.
In this chapter, you’ll learn all about pages and how to work with them to control the presentation of your web project.