Corporate websites are getting more and more advanced with new technology such as Flash, ColdFusion, PHP and the like. Most people would overlook HTML 4 as a prime language for their business' website. But if you look at the flexibility of HTML, you can see why we aren't overlooking it entirely. Now, the first thing you need to do to get ready is make an offline folder called "Www". This is where all of your pages and information is kept. In that folder, make another called "image" for graphics, and "text" for any text files, as well as possibly a "download" folder, for any PDF, ZIP or EXE files to put on the page. Keep in mind though, that because HTML is simple, you can't put anything you wouldn't want people to download or see without some kind of permission (via username and password), unless you want to start adding javascript, or CGI. The other option for that is putting everything in flash, but I don't reccommend it, since you will lose most of the internet's 56k and 28.8 users (even though the flash program does say in it that all flash can be streamed properly on a 56k). Now that you are set up, make a page called "nav.html" and one called "content.html". The nav file will have links to all your other HTML files, and content will have your company's information. The next job you have is to make a page that uses the frameset tag that joins the two files together on one page, but still as separate files. Now, when you link from the nav bar to the content of your web page, you have to include a special command in your "a href" link tag. after the link area is defined, use the target command to tell it to go to the content section (example: ... target="content"). Now that we have that out of the way, the best way to link from page to page after the main file (usually the product information page) is to link to them in the same file, away from the nav bar, (so you don't have to link to a new nav bar) is to include the links at the top. An example below using links to some websites.
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That leaves a professional look on the page, and still lets you hold all the information you need. Obviously, you want to link to your own pages though, so maybe you would have, say, pictures of the product, product specs and ordering information. Sometimes, a few graphics will make a page look better, such as a banner people can use to link to your web site, or your company logo. The rest of the design process is yours to try. I've given you the hard technical side, now let your ideas fly, but not in a WinXP sort of way.
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