Greetings Evelyn, the following are a few samples of what I can do with Tripod. Note that this isn't all that can be done: I have experience in basic HTML, some Javascript, very little Java, and almost no Flash. All of which I've tasted, but I know there's an awful lot more to learn, and experience is a better teacher than a book (by far). I'll test out a few ideas here, explain them, and let you decide if they fit into your artistic view of the website.
In short, these are the building blocks. Build as you wish.
Text:
What can I say? For basic text web pages, your freedom is limitless. Any size font, any color, any background color, any font, any text decoration (just about). A few things to realize when making a web page is that you want it to be presentable, coordinated, accessible and fast. This means that, while font can be anything you wish, of course, limitations should be imposed. That much is obvious. What isn't very obvious is that some computers don't support certain fonts. I have on my computer a Super Mario font, one where all text looks like that from the video game. Not many people have that. I also have a font on my computer that I myself created. I'm the only one who has that. If you were to use that font on a web page, I would see it, but you and no one else would... it would default to whatever the browser default is. Given that, one should stick to the more basic fonts: Arial, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Courier.
Examples to follow
Hello World!
Images:
Quite easy. HTML supports all images, and you can do fun things with them. Firstly, banners. Most websites have their logo up on top. That tends to be an image. Secondly, links. Text is good, but images allow the webmaster supreme control over what the link does and looks like. Also, with Javascript, one can make the image do different things when the user interacts with it. A common one is to have it change to a different but similar image when the user rolls the mouse over it and/or clicks it. Images, of course, take up hard disk space. The larger and better-quality the image is, the more space it will take up. One way around this is to open up a few Photobucket accounts and link to the images from there. Another thing I'd like to try is a Flash-based catalog which links to Photobucket-stored images. It would provide a terrific user interface and cut down hard disk space to bare minimum. At the moment I don't know how to do that, but I know where I can find out. A Flash-based catalog would suit our purposes perfectly for the time being; divided into sections for different classes of pieces, further divided into images for each piece, etc.
Examples to follow
Tables:
Tables are rather simple... it's a way of parsing a section of a web page into a grid, quite similar to an Excel spreadsheet. The upside to this is order; you can arrange things very nicely. The downside is that everything in the table has to be within the web page itself (unlike frames, which also parse a web page into sections but each section is an individual web page, rather than just a piece of one). They have their uses, but aren't terribly popular.
Examples to follow
Flash:
Ok, this is the fun stuff. Because Frames aren't allowed, the only way to dynamically update a page without loading a new page is to embed a program of some sort, either a Java applet (which tends to take a long time to load and lag the users computer) or Flash. Flash is probably the best bet, since it can be artistically altered and updated easily. A purely flash site, something akin to www.homestarrunner.com, would be ideal, as it would completely alleviate the need to create massive numbers of new pages, though the technicality is beyond me (for the moment). Below is a rather cheesy example of a simple slide-show created in Flash. The images are either drawn using Flash or embedded within the movie. If we're careful with everything it should be fine to create slide-shows this way. I'll look for other avenues though, it's important that we keep the file size to a minimum. Also, the higher the file size, the more we need a pre-loader. I can do those, mainly because there are a lot of tutorials out there on the subject. As it is now, the Flash movie is not part of the physical web site; it's linked from my Photobucket account. Creating a few Photobucket accounts and linking things this way can alleviate some of the physical memory on the website.
Forms:
Forms are useful things, they provide crucial interactivity. Buttons, text boxes, check boxes, et cetera. One of the most important is the ability to send the completed form to an email address. I personally have never successfully managed this, but I'll give it a go. It can make automated ordering quite simple.
