You'll find the process easier if you center your main page on your primary focus. Your secondary projects can go on pages further down inside your site.
Think of your home page as the lobby in your online building. Your lobby tells your visitors what you are about, and guides them to the information they are seeking. The style, the colors and fonts and pictures, tell your customers who you are. Here are some simple design rules:
Use no more than three fonts on your home page. Using more than three fonts is confusing for the reader and makes you appear amateurish.
Break up large areas of text with boxes, pictures, and call outs. You can put large articles on other pages in your website…this is your lobby, remember?
Colored backgrounds are passé. Simple white is your best friend.
Don't use giant pictures. Even in today's high speed world they can take a long time to load, which imposes on your visitor to wait for you. Bad manners in the real world should not be repeated in the digital world!
Here's a secret to help you design your page: take a quick tour around the web, visiting the sites of people in your same business. Then visit the sites of the big guys, like General Motors and McDonald's. They are at the very forefront of corporate web design. You can use the same ideas on your website.
Adding Text
Now, you know what your lobby should look like. You know what you want to say. You're ready to go!
Double click on the Home button in the center box on the right. On the main screen is a little box that says “Coffee Club” on it. Right click on that, and select “Edit Theme Graphic”. Here you can change the words, the font, the font color, and even the background color. Make whatever changes you want, and click OK.
In the box below the graphic button you just modified is a large box filled with Latin characters. I don't speak Latin, but I'm sure this box says something! Right click on this box, and choose “Edit Story”. Here is where you can type in your text.
At the top of this box, you'll see Format on the menu bar. Selecting this allows you to change the fonts and colors of your text. It's rather like Word, and rather easy! When you've typed in your stuff and got it looking like you'd like, click on the little green arrow on the toolbar. Congratulations! You created your first piece of your web site!
To add a new text box, look over there on the left of the screen. In Word we'd call it a text box. In Serif we call it an HTML Frame Tool. Click on the little box with “H” in the upper left corner. Now go over to your page in the center of the screen and click/scroll out the box where you'd like it to go. Right click on your new box, and select “Edit Story” again. Congratulations! You've done it again!
Adding Pictures
Three icons below the HTML Frame Tool button on the left side of the screen is a little tiny photograph. Click on that, and it will bring you a navigation pane to find your picture. Browse for the picture you want, click on Open, and the click/scroll the picture into your site. Things are looking good now!
Moving Elements
You can move your HTML Frames and pictures wherever you'd like. If you can't move something, no matter how many times you click on it, the item is most likely on the Master Page, not the page you're working on. Click on View/Master Page to move that item.
Working with Additional Pages
Now that you've doctored up your home page, it's time to go after those other pages. Double clicking on any of those pages in the center right box will open that page in the central pane. You can edit the crackers out of them, if you'd like. If you right click over the button in the right center box, you'll see that you can delete them, insert or add them, and change their properties.
When you add a page, you get a little fill-in form to set up the page. The important thing about this form is the page name…it shows Page8. Change the name there and then click on OK. You get a page with nothing on it other than the stuff from the Master Page. Talk about your blank canvas!
Page Names, SEO, and You
