Newbie Questions

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Newbie Questions

Hi,

I'm new to iWeb and web page design in general though I do have limited experience with html and coding. My apologies if these questions have been covered before - I've searched all over the internet forums and haven't found concise answers so I'm hoping you may be able to help. For info, I'll be uploading to my own domain.

Right, here goes -

1. I want my homepage to play a short mp3 music loop when the page loads but I don't want a player to be visible. How do I hide the default Quicktime player from view or code the page so that a player doesn't appear?

2. The page is for a band and I want some quotes from the press to appear on the page. Rather than just be a long text list, I'd like these to be animated and fade in / out (so basically, one press quote appears, then fades out, then the next fades in, etc - again on a loop). How do I do this?

3. I have some links which will take you to the Facebook / Myspace / YouTube pages of the band. How do I get these to open in a new tab, rather than opening in the current browser tab?

4. I would like to insert a couple of free mp3 downloads on one of the pages. How do I do this?

5. I would like a slide show of photos to run on one page. Again, how do I do this?

6. Final question - At the moment, after I have uploaded to FTP and then type in the web address in my browser, it always opens the home page as www.mysite.com/home.html as 'home' is the name I gave to that page. How do I get the home page to open directly on the web address www.mysite.com (without the /home.html part)?

Many thanks,

Simon

iWeb '08

Posted on Jun 10, 2011 2:01 AM

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Answer 1

Old Toad

Level 10

216,506 points

Jun 10, 2011 11:08 AM in response to theshadowproject

#1 - there are a number of ways to hid the QT audio file but remember if you drag the audio track onto the iWeb page the visitor will be required to have Quicktime installed in order to hear it. Best to use one of the audio players described in Roddy's iWeb for Musicians site: Music Player. Roddy probably know how you could hide it other than putting it in the footer and then reducing the footer heigh so it doesn't display. If you do that set the volume down so you don't blow out unsuspecting visitors who might have their computer's sound set high for some other reason. Better to let them up their end of it to hear the music at their comfort level.

#2 - make images of the press quotes and use the method described in Wyodor's page Create a banner slideshow. It could be any shape and be placed anywhere on the page.

#4 - compress/zip the mp3 files and put them on the server. Then create a text based hyperlink to the zipped file. When selected the zipped file will automatically start downloading.

#5 - you can use the slideshow in #2 or use the iWeb slideshow with code by Cyclosaurus so you don't have to go thru the photo page to get to it. This demo page is an example: Custom iPhoto Album. It would be easy to setup as all you need to do is create a photo page and then add the code to it via an HTML snippet. You could use the same method for the press clippings but would not have the control over the speed of them. Not sure is Wyodor's method will let you set the slide duration.

#6 - to get just your domain name in the URL window you will need to use standard URL domain name forwarding with masking. However, there are drawbacks to using domain name forwarding with masking:

Visitors can only enter your web site via the first page.
Visitors can only bookmark the first page of your site.
If a visitor refreshes a page they will be taken back to the first page of the site.
Search engines will only be able to use the first page of your site for indexing and rating your site.

That can seriously limit getting your site recognized by search engines. It's not recommended. There's nothing wrong with having the page name in the URL window. The short domain name will get visitors to the site easily and once there they can bookmark pages the want to return to. They won't be looking at the URL. It'll the the site's appearance and content that they will remember and bring them back.

OT

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