The website orientation is based on your particular needs from the website. Traditionally many of the earlier websites were full screen implementations or "liquid" designs. This meant that the design moved as the browser window was expanded or collapsed. This type of design brought a few design issues to the technology as the look and feel of the website (with a liquid design) was never really established. Fixed width was much more popular with designers as they could ensure that every user saw the website in the same way.

Many websites use left justification typically with a fixed width. However with the advent of powerful flat panel displays capable of widescreen resolutions, it quickly became clear that left justified designs would leave potentially 50% of the full screen design space unused.

Centre justified websites have become the de-facto standard as they offer the designer a fixed design space but utilise the centre stage of the web browser. Background images using the full width compound this illusion.

eMockups recommend a centre justified solution.

Websites support two types of scrolling, vertical and horizontal. 99% of all websites produced have vertical scrolling as this best defines the way the English language is read. We typically read from top left to bottom right.

This does not mean that we should be using vertical scrolling though. Horizontal scrolling can make quick a design impact if implemented properly. Take a look at The Horizontal Way Website as a showcase for how to implement horizontal scrolling.

Websites display both text and graphics to create an image for the user. Text loads quickly in the browser and is usually followed by the graphical elements.

Photographs and custom graphic elements take up much more disk space and consequently take longer to load. Another downside to graphical elements is that search engines (like Ask or Google) cannot "see" what is being displayed. This means that we can't do without text.

Whilst the web designer can use all the font typefaces to create the website, only the fonts physically loaded on the user's computer will be available to display the text. This means that if the web designer wants to use a funky font like GoodDog as the text typeface, only the computers connecting to the website that have the GoodDog font installed would see the website as the web designer had expected. For most of us, the browser would subsitute another local font which might look all wrong.

For this reason web designers tend to stick with a handful of font familes or fonts that look similar. The items on this page are typical font families that should be present on 99% of computers (Macs & PCs).

This means that we will insert a placeholder for the hyperlink. This is to enable the hyperlink to function and the various states to appear, such as the visited state or the active state.

If you untick this box we will hard encode all hyperlinks to the root/homepage which is default.htm (for Dreamweaver users) or default.aspx (for ASP.NET users)

This means that the hyperlinks will render as a slightly different colour from the other main text.

You can specifiy what colour the hyperlink text should be as well as on-hover, on-active, on-visited and on-link states. These values can be selected after the submission process has begun within Your Web Projects  section of this website.

A breadcrumb link shows the virtual relationship of the web page within the website hierarchy. This is to ease navigation and is a visual reminder to your users where they are. We will create the div to hold the breadcrumb and insert the ASP.NET code to handle the display. You will need to amend the sitemap.config file for the breadbrumb link to display properly.

A sitemap is a special ASP.NET file that can be used as a basis for website navigation and to provide the breadcrumb link with the hierarchical data. The file is written in XML and is especially useful for website search engines spider software, as it shows all the pages in your site that are available to the Internet.
If you don't select this option breadcrumb links in ASP.NET will need a proprietry XML datasource.

We will create your template with external CSS files if this option is ticked. This means that the styling components will be written to a separate CSS file. This file hold all styling attributes for the web template and usually resides in the \CSS directory of the website.

Not using an external CSS file can result in performance issues especially in larger websites. If you untick this option we will insert the CSS data in the HEAD section of the template file.

Asp.Net Version 3.5 is the latest version of .NET available from Microsoft. Version 3.5 has support for AJAX Extensions & new controls for handling data such as the new Listview Control and DataPager.
If you untick this option we will create your template in Asp.Net version 2.0.

AJAX is an exciting set of developer tools that allow Win32 type functionality for web pages. AJAX tools can render objects on webpages that are inituitive and mimic the computer's operating system. This means that your users are able to navigate your website more intuitively and effectively. This page is created using the Ajax Accordion panel which allows the display of a lot of text and graphics in a small footprint. This couldn't be achieved with straight HTML.

We will install AJAX Support to your web.config file if this box is ticked and all appropriate dll's where neccessary. If you don't want AJAX controls at this time you can install AJAX support at a later date. ASP.NET & AJAX is available as a free download from asp.net/