Chapter 3 / Customize Your Blank Template.

"Web Site Building-101"

How do you want your site to look?

What is the purpose of this site?

If you are planning on promoting a particular program or product online to make some money, then I would say the first thing you should be building is a "capture page." A capture page is normally a one page site, designed to "capture" your visitors name and email address, most commonly, and save them into a "list" for future marketing purposes. This is arguably the number one way to find success over the long term, working online. 

For the sake of this course, let's work with building a capture page for our example. 

The first thing that I normally due is to choose a "header graphic" to work with for my new site. This is simply the image or graphic that you see at the top of the page. Click here to choose some of the standard ones I have included with this course. 

Decide which one will work for you, and don't over think it. You can get crazy with picking the exact one you like at another time. Right click over one of the images and then left click to "save picture as." Choose to save to your desktop, and name it whatever you will remember it best by, or leave it the name it is. Be sure the file type is either JPG for this example.

I have to say that these are really just for the purpose of teaching how to insert the graphic. If you really want your site to be a certain way, after learning how to do it, I would recommend finding some header images that are editable, like in a .PSD format which means it's a Photoshop file. Photoshop is a program that comes with most PC's. It is very easy to open a .PSD image file through Photoshop or Paint or some basic graphics editing program and make very easy changes to an image.

Right, so let's continue with the samples I have included...

O.K., inside your NVU editor, and with the blank template open, we will be focusing on the "Optional Header Text Here" portion at the very top. Place your cursor at the end of that red text, and start backspacing it out. When you get down to the last letter to be back spaced out be sure to go slow so that your flashing courser stays between the two yellow exclamation points.

Now click on "Insert" in the top tool bar of your editor. Select the first choice which is to "Image." Now click on "Choose File." Navigate to your Desktop, where the JPG image file is, and click on it one time. Next you will be asked by the editor if you should use what's called "alternate text," or not to. It is a good practice to always use alternate text. 

Alternate text is simply the text that will show when you mouse over an image, explaining what the image is. Also, a lot of people's computers block images initially for security purposes. If the image is blocked at least the alternate text will tell the person what the image is, should they choose to show it. One other good reason for doing this is for slower Internet connections. While the image is loading, the text will usually show at the very least while waiting for the image to fully load.

Continue to Chapter 4