Create a Course Website

After talking about the panning of a website and developing contents of a website, in this chapter, the author is talking about how to create the site. This is an exciting chapter because we are closing to have our own website – that is we begin to build a house.
As the author said the fest step of site creation is to decide on a design approach. There many ways for us to choose to, however, I think we should choose one of them. This is choose a fixed method to design our website is a better way because we should unify design and structure of each page, make them coherence and easy to maintain. The reasons why we choose one approach are it is easy for users to follow, navigate, and adjust. Another concern about different approaches is the problem of compatible because not all the software that used in creating website can work well with each other. Then which approach you want to choose, I think this is up to what kind of website you want to design because different tools may have different advantage or disadvantage. Normally, I prefer dreamweaver, it is easy and powerful.
Whenever we are talking about graphics that used in a website, there must be two concerns: size and resolution. We do not want to put graphics that are very big in our website because it will cause long time to download them when users are browsing the site. However, we do not want to lose resolution either, it is painful to both the creators and users when the graphics can only be shown in very bad resolution and nobody will come back to site again. So normally people choose graphic in GIFF or JEPG format. There are also some differences between these two formats too. GIF format compress images through LZW compression that is very good for the images which have large areas of single color. Let us see the JEPG format, JEPG format can achieve a higher compression than GIFF. Another advantage if using JEPG is that users can control the rate of compressing. Of course, the higher qualified images, the bigger file size. But users can adjust the rate of compression according to the different use of images. In fact, there are also other concerns about the format of images, such as safety, some people prefer to use small and lower resolution graphics to protect their works.
About the navigation system, as we already talked about at the first chapter: navigation system can not only help users go through all the pages in a website, but also show users the contents in a website. So the principles of creating navigation systems are to help users go through the whole website easily, and show users the contents clearly. We can use graphic menus, text links, or both. This is up to the situation of a real website. For example, if there are already many pictures in a website, I suggest using text links. If there are only text blocks on a web page, graphics menu may work better. Not all the problems that we may have when we are creating a website, will be mentioned in this book. We need to append time and practice to gain experience. The next website will always be better than the current one.