PageMill Guide PGS

A Personal Guide for Adobe PageMill

PageMill can bring a completely new wave of people to the web, especially graphics, desktop publishing and design pros who were until now put off by the web's "technicalities"like HTML programming, forms design plus CGI scripting, etc.

PageMill Guide PGS is a suite of three applications based on Apple's Apple Guide technology, teaching you everything you need to successfully dream up and piece together your web site, and put it on the web.

Here's a description of the guides:

• PageMill Basics PGS - in this learning program you learn how to do a web page the easy way, step-by-step. No previous web experience is required. Please note that this learning application is not some multimedia monster application devouring all your Mac's RAM. It's integrated into your Mac's system and interacts with your work in PageMill in the form of a free floating window. It is not a separate program; the moment you double-click the guide it's directly integrated into PageMill and is ready for you - the user.
  
  In other words: it's like having a personal guide assisting you every step of the way. Since this is about "real" life, you to do a real web page - our own home page.
  
  
• Advanced PageMill PGS - the sequel to PageMill Basics PGS; this guide takes you in an effective and straight forward manner into the advanced features of PageMill. Not only will you learn how to use PageMill to the limit, you will also learn how to fine-tune PageMill to do things it cannot do yet, like creating tables, frames, etc.
  
  If you want to know what's included in this guide, check out the quick summary further below.
  
  
• PageMill Reference PGS - OK. Now you know everything (:-)), but wouldn't it be nice to have a detailed reference on your desktop whenever you work in PageMill? Apple Guide actually is the ideal technology to provide you with a "task-oriented" reference. That means, whenever you wonder: 'How do I do this?', you simply look up the reference and find your answer there, at the click of the mouse. Naturally, this reference includes an index, and you can search for a specific answer using key words.
  
  
• Want still more? Wasn't enough? All right ... since everything surrounding the web is evolving at warp speed, don't expect this suite of guides to be the end of all things. As soon as Adobe brings out updates to Adobe PageMill, or new "Web design crazes"come up, we update our guides. That means, registered users will get from us guide additions which enhance and rejuvenate their present guide applications.

PageMill Guide PGS is Shareware

Without registering you get the application in this package with the complete PageMill Basics, the first application of the guide suite.

If you decide to register - using the Register PGS application which is part of the Installer package - you will get from us for FREE:

• a password to unlock the Installer for Advanced PageMill PGS and PageMill Reference PGS which you can find on our web site ready for download as soon as it's available (actually the first four sections are out already.
  
  
• Email support what the whole suite of PageMill Guide PGS is concerned, and as much email help concerning all aspects of PageMill as we can give! We want to point out here that we are not Adobe and have little capacity left, but since we want our product to evolve, we're happy to hear from you!
  
  
• other goodies and benefits may come up.

We need your feedback!

Quick summary of Advanced PageMill

Select any of the chapters that seem of particular interest to you (A tip: to return to this selection, click into the text until a popup appears, then select Back in Frame):

Quick PageMill Tour

For the most part this section is meant for experienced HTML writers, wanting to know what is new and different about Adobe PageMill. It focuses on the tools and menus of PageMill, also explains to experienced and new user alike, how to set up the preferences for image folders, imagemaps, etc. effectively, so one avoids hassle with broken references to objects like pages or images, when the time to upload the site arrives.

Working with images

Images are the salt of any web site, and PageMill offers many ways to include images in web documents. We focus in this chapter on PageMill's possibilities to manipulate images for effective web use. It includes topics like making GIFs transparent, interlacing, resizing images.

We also give tips on how to set up a folder for resources or images effectively inside your web site.

Even though it goes far beyond PageMill, we cannot leave people working with images without some side-trips to related topics like: "How do I prepare images for the web?" Lots could be said about this, we try to make it as brief and yet useful to you as possible. We will also cover a lot of image helper programs and Photoshop filters that are useful to any aspiring web designer.

Background images and colors

This section will be rather short, since PageMill makes it very easy to change the background document color, but also text color. Also you will be surprised to see how quickly you can include a background image, if you want to.

Links and anchors

In most Macintosh applications you'll always find several ways to do something. Same with creating links in PageMill. There are mostly three ways to do it. We go through all of them. We also cover the making of anchors in this chapter, the linking of a specific place inside a page to another, as it is used often for tables of contents or this particular summary. You will be amazed how simple that works!

Online forms and CGIs

Ever wondered how those cool looking online forms on the web were made? When you've completed this part of the Advanced PageMill guide you will no longer wonder but do it yourself with no effort at all. Actually, all that will be left to you to do is to actually think about what to put into the form, and how you want to structure it.

We will also talk about CGI's, and why companies like Netscape are proposing that people write applications that interact between client (the browser) and the server (where the web site is) using the Netscape API (application programming interface) instead of CGIs. We also talk about Java, an object-oriented language meant for professional client/server solutions and Java Script, and what this all could mean for CGI's future prospects.

Naturally, we cannot teach you here how to program CGI's, since that's beyond this guide, but we tell you how you can find the resources to do it.

Of course, you will also get a lot of practice: In our online form example we will use a simple trick, so that you can receive and process data from your web site viewers without going into CGI programming.

Imagemaps

It's perhaps the most popular feature of the present web: the click and point way of choosing links. This is fun to do in PageMill. We also talk about why companies like Netscape or Spyglass are paving the way to get client-side imagemaps as a standard, that means no more special server setup for imagemaps. This is especially good news for web designer, since they can really concentrate on designing cool images that serve as maps without the hassle of setting them up correctly for their type of server (like NCSA, Cern or Netscape).

Raw HTML - The fine-tuning

A few PageMill users were disappointed that they could not use many of the popular web features like tables, frames, etc.

PageMill provides a command in the Style menu called Raw HTML. Using it you can include all of those popular things. In this section we tell you how to do this and give tips on how to process already existing web documents in PageMill without distorting them, since PageMill always interprets HTML tags it knows and ignores those it cannot.

An important fact here: PageMill supports the HTML 2.0 standard and the extensions of Netscape Navigator 1.1N. It does not support (yet) the new proposed elements for HTML 3.0 and the popular Netscape 2.0 extensions, etc.

We show you how to work around this.

Uploading your site

If you want to successfully upload your web site, consisting of HTML documents, images, and other resources, you need to configure the PageMill preferences right from the start.

We show you how to do this, so the links between document and images, e.g. remain intact.

And we will tell you that if you think about having your web site presented to the public (instead of just in-house on a server), you should ask your Internet Service Provider, or web space rent service some good questions. Depending on his answers you will know if you can grow with your provider, or if you should rather look for another one.

The actual upload can be very easy, if a few rules are followed. We take you through a real life example using Fetch 3.0, the cool drag and drop Shareware FTP client by the Dartmouth College.

What next? Publicize and maintain

If you think that you slaved real hard over your web site and after the upload to your web space provider the work is over, you may overlook the nature of the web: the constant evolution and change.

We think the work finally starts after the upload, since now you must make sure that the expectations of the often very critical web public are met. Not an easy thing to do. Maintenance, therefore, is not just technical, but more of a creative nature. You need plenty of ideas to make your web site always look fresh and new.

Before you do that, however, your site first needs to be known. There are many services, from public to commercial ones that help you make your site known. We will talk about some of them and share with you some links to others.

Is that everything?

Well, yes and no. In time when PageMill evolves, so will this guide. If you like, we keep you informed.

© 1996 by SQE Services Ltd., Zurich/Switzerland.
All rights reserved. Last updated: March 24, 1996