Howdy all!

I'm brand new to Coffee Cup and a total newbie with website creation. HTML code gives me hives.

I'm just starting my first website and I already have a few questions. I've purchased the Website Starter Pack and I'm using the Visual Site Designer.

A few questions:

1) I want to make sure that I get things organized from the start so that I'm not having to move files around later. I could have sworn that I saw there was some kind of software or something to help keep all my files organized. I did a search on "website organize" and found an article on "Working With Website Projects" with step by step instructions. Awesome!! But what the hell IS Website Projects? Is it software? Is it something additional I need to buy? Is it included in something? Can you help me find this thing???

2) In Visual Site Designer I've chosen the advanced text option. I get a very excited pop up message saying that I can now do all these fantastic things with my text. But... how the hell do I do it???? Where is the toolbar for Text? When I click on Text on the far left it just says that I can create text anywhere. Ugh.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Gwen

Gwen. Sounds as if you have enough patience to read manuals from what you say, so how about trying to read the one for VSD and keep the program open at the same time so that you can pop between instructions and VSD interface to see what is being referred to. Just size down the application window and open up the help files too. You can drag the small help window out the way and switch between the two as you experiment.

Basically, it is down to you to organize your files. The program will organize its own, and as you develop pages, everything will connect up between the various elements of the pages you build. And that is what projects are all about...
You may only ever have one Website Project, because maybe you will only ever build one web site... unless you get the bug like a lot of us in here and keep inventing new reasons for building yet another site! So as I said earlier, a website project really just means that everything you have on the site will be organized into one area (aka project), containing image files, flash files, coded pages etc.etc)

You will find a whole bunch of questions and answers other users have put forward in this forum area
http://www.coffeecup.com/forums/designer/

As you are just learning, why not set yourself up a "Trial Website Project" and play around, creating a fictitious web site of a few pages to get the hang of things. You can always eleminate all that when you feel more confident. I am a great believer in pen and paper... getting all my ideas down clearly on paper before I start on my pages. Decide how many pages you want... how many links you must add in the menu... what images you will be using (and get them prepared in advance). It will save you time in the long run to have some kind of plan drawn up.

Now... good luck and let us know how things proceed

Being a web developer I have a lot of files to keep track of, so what I do is this:

Create a file called: websites and place it on my desktop.
In that file I create all of my website files and name them after the websites I am creating like:

my-site-1
my-site-2
my-site-3
ETC.,

This way i have all of my sites organized in one file and I know which file is for what site. Keeps everything very organized for me.

It is also important to name your files logically. So, If you have a text file you want to keep track of and it is going in your "about me" section, then name it "about-me". Stuff like that.

<<2) In Visual Site Designer I've chosen the advanced text option. I get a very excited pop up message saying that I can now do all these fantastic things with my text. But... how the hell do I do it???? Where is the toolbar for Text? When I click on Text on the far left it just says that I can create text anywhere. Ugh.>>

Hi Gwen,

Here's what you do. Click on the T on the tool bar and then click ok on the message pop up. Then take your mouse and drag it across the screen. You'll see a red box start to shape up. Start typing in the text box and you'll see the text start to wrap as you go along. You'll notice a left and right arrow on opposite sides of the box. If you click the mouse and hold it on one of them, you can expand the box. The other, and I forget what they are called, on the top and bottom allow you to position the text box any where on the page. After you finish typing the text, click anywhere on the page and the box changes from red to blue. Then you can use your arrow keys on the keyboard to move the text box around.

I am new to VSD too, I purchased is about a month ago and I am still learning too. I think others have posted about the folders; I am not there yet to answer that one. Good luck!!

Vito

Hey Gwen,

How did you make out? I hope you are creating fabulous web pages! I just thought about this and wanted to share it with you. I found some great tutorials on Youtube for CoffeeCup Visual. If you go to google and post specificially what you are looking to do, you'll get some good hits. I posted the search I did below, just copy and paste it in your browser. Have fun!!

Vito

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&tbs=vi … 213a37e8ff

Website Projects are a feature included with the HTML Editor. For VSD, just create your own website folder and keep everything for that website in it (usually organized in additional folders: images, articles, graphics, etc...).

Thanks for the link, Vito!