There are many Yahoo Groups concerned with taking photographs, editing , cropping and printing them. But there are few if any dedicated to helping you present them on the web. That is what this one is about.
There are three basic steps involved in putting your pictures on the web.
(1)Finding a satisfactory web host.
(2)Preparing the files for your site.
(3)Uploading the files to your site.
The second step is by far the most complicated.
The purpose of this guide is to help you at each of these stages.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the language that instructs your browser to present a web page on your computer screen. The source text for this page is in HTML. You can view the source, a text document, by going to the top of the screen and choosing View>Source. You will need to learn some HTML to build a website. Some web hosts have page editors so that you need very little knowledge to build a page, but in my experience you can build a much more attractive and usable page if you learn some HTML. This guide is basically written for those who are not "HTML Savvy" but those who know HTML will understand it much more readily.
I have prepared web pages that you can use to present your images. These pages consist of thumbnail pages (indexes) and image pages. Most of the image pages open full screen width and height with a black background and the image is centered vertically and horizontally. These pages don't need to be "coded" for the size of the image, saving a great deal of labor. There are also pages that open a window that snugly fits the image size. These do need to be coded, but only the image pages need be coded, thus again saving labor. If you wish to add a descriptive text to the image files you may do so. After you have described the images, if you choose to, you use an automated program to rename the images to match the page reference names. There are also slide show formats. Using these prepared pages allows you to assemble a thumbnail page and as many as 36 image pages, complete with files (images) in about ten minutes. And the pages have a much better appearance then just opening a .jpeg in a browser window. They also work faster than the commercially prepared software pages because they use no interactive script. They offer protection for your images in the form of click-to-close or no-right-click, and there are unprotected versions. You can see examples of the full screen and fitted formats here:
Format examples.
Instructions for using the main files.
It's certainly true that you can use commercially available, and often expensive, programs to prepare web pages, but these frequently involve a considerable amount of Javascript, another page building language (my pages use some Javascript) which may or may not be compatable with the webhost provider. Webhosts often put Javascript on user's pages, sometimes it is "hidden" so that the browser doesn't present it, but it may affect the page operation. One reason I have made several types of pages is to get around the problem of script incompatability. It's also the reason I've placed finding a web host first on the list instead of second. The choice of web host may well determine what kind of files you can upload and what your site will look like. If you can afford to buy webspace from a provider that doesn't put script on the pages and allows you to use script, style and other languages, then you can put up any files you want.
Tips on finding a Web Host
Building a website. By far the best way to build a website is to make a complete working model of it in a folder in Documents in your computer. This allows you to fully check it's operation and also maintain spare files in case your host loses any of your files. The host's servers are high tech electromechanical devices and will fail from time to time, causing you to lose some files.
Building your site.
A twenty minute primer on HTML.
There are two basic ways of uploading files to your site. A site or file manager, and FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Some sites use both methods, some only one. If you're uploading only a few files, say fifty, then a site manager is satisfactory, but for uploading large numbers an FTP is a must. I've uploaded more than a thousand files to a site in half an hour using FTP.
Uploading files.
