Managing Your Web Design Template (Quick Guide)

- Unzipping Template Package
- Installing Fonts
- How to Customize Your Template
- Creating Sub Pages
- Uploading Files to Your Web Hosting
- CSS Template Editing Tips

- Unzipping Template Package

Most software or content that is available on the Internet today comes in the form of a compressed file with an extension like .zip or .rar. To extract such compressed files, you will require having a decompressing utility installed in your computer. There are many such utilities available. However, we recommend WinZip or Winrar for PC and Stuffit Expander for Mac users.

Following the norms, all our packages also come in .ZIP file format. You need either WinZip or WinRar to extract. Click on the above links to download and run install or setup.

Double click on the downloaded template package. In the pop up window:

1. Use the drop-down menu at the top of the window to specify the folder where you want to extract the files, or key-in the entire path.
2. Mark the Use Folder Names check-box. (This prevents loss of data/folders from the template package)
3. Click on the Extract button to decompress the files.

Figure: WinRAR Extract Window

- Installing Fonts

It is critical that you install the fonts before you proceed with working with the source files. All fonts included in the template package are used in the source files. We recommend you to use any of the available font manager software, like Adobe Type Manager Light, or you could also install the fonts manually as follows:

1. Open the Fonts folder of the template package.
2. Identify and copy the required fonts.
3. Paste the copied fonts into windows/fonts folders for all versions of Windows, except Windows NT. For Windows NT, paste the fonts into the Windows NT/fonts folder.

Figure: Font Folder

- Customizing Your Template

Website templates provided by us are easily customizable. All our web templates are provided in full, along with all source files. By adding creative ideas, these templates can easily be customized to make them unique. However, to incorporate profound changes, you will require moderate to advanced level expertise in animation/image editing software.

1. Web content and scripts can be added to the template by using HTML editors like Macromedia DreamWeaver or FrontPage depending upon your preferences and ease of use.
2. Images can be edited or added by using commonly available image editing software like Adobe Photoshop or any other software that you feel easier to use. All images are provided in formats supported by most of the image editing software.
3. Likewise, animation can be developed and added by using animation software. We recommend Flash from Adobe.

In case you are new to this aspect of website making, you can send us a request and we will be happy to customize it for you at a nominal cost. We have a team of extremely tech savvy professional web designers at our disposal and we could get your customization in the minimum possible time.

However, in case you feel that you cannot express your ideas without being on-the-site, we can recommend you to engage a professional web designer to impart the necessary major changes.

To get an estimate from us, please send in your ideas along with the template id# and we will get back to you at the earliest.

- Creating Sub Pages

Our complete package of any website template contains all pages that could be normally required for a website in the desired category. However, in the event that you need more pages on the same theme, sub-pages can be easily created.

Normal aesthetics and designing logic requires that all the pages of a given website should carry the same design or theme. Hence, there is a need to customize the original page that needs to be replicated before proceeding to make more pages..

To create sub pages:

1. Go to the HTML folder of the template package.
2. Right click on the html file you have already customized, and open with any of the Internet browsers, like Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft IE installed on your computer.
3. Open the file menu from the tool bar, and click on “Save as” or “Save file as”
4. Save the file in the preferred folder by entering the desired file name with .html extension, like products.html

To add content to the sub-pages thus created by replication, refer to the help page “customizing your template”

- Uploading Files to Your Web Server

The Web Hosting server is where your entire website files will reside. Once the files are copied or uploaded to your web hosting server, you will be to view your website online, in a browser and so will the entire world.

Many applications are available to make this process simpler, WSFTP or SmartFTP are the more popular ones. However, if you use Mozilla Firefox, you can make use of the FireFTP plugin that it has to upload files quickly.

This process can be taken care of manually too, as follows:

1. Open a web browser.
2. Key in ftp://domainname.com in the address line, where domain name is your website URL.
3. In the pop window you get, key in the login and password for the web hosting account that you have already got. In case the pop window does not appear, go to the “File” menu and select “Enter As”. This will open the login dialog.
4. Hit enter or Click “OK”, and you will be granted access to FTP server of the web-host.
5. Copy and paste the Web Pages, files and folders to the site root directory (usually called “//httpdocs”, but verify before you start uploading). It is critical that the html files are places in the root folder of the of the web hosting. Ensure that the folder structure provided along with the template package is maintained while copying the files onto the web-host. For example, all images should be saved in the /image folder, and all animation movie files in /Flash folder.

- CSS Template Editing Tips

CSS, the short form of Cascading Style Sheets, is a new development that helps webmasters define the way their website pages are displayed. All CSS templates included in our templates are fully stretchable, and can accommodate content of varied amount, be it text or images.

Out of the two sections of a web page, the main column is designed to accommodate more content than the secondary column. However, if the content put in the secondary column is more than the primary one, some misalignment may creep in. This misalignment can be easily corrected by increasing the page length and by adding line break tags at the end of the primary column to align them.

Remember, CSS has slowly but steadily replaced the concept of tables due to alignment issues and other issues related to SEO. Using CSS can prove to be more beneficial in the long run.