Your very own webpage in 5 simple steps!

Building a webpage - especially designing it, can be a bore - hence we bring you this easy to use template to build your own webpage. Similar templates were used to set up the following sites
A few people have used this template to design their webpages - if you do so too, please send me a mail so that I can put your website on this list.
Since these are personal webpages, they might change over time and switch to other templates. The template itself conforms to the CSS level 2.1 and HTML 4.01 Transitional standards and so shall your webpage if you are a bit careful. You can then proudly put the W3C validator icons in the footer (details below).

Contact the webmaster here for any queries/suggestions.

Follow these 5 simple steps to set up your webpage. First of all unzip the contents of the archive template.zip (download it from here) into your webarea. The file index.php should be present in the web directory itself - not in a subdirectory
  1. Open the file header.inc in a text editor and modify the value of the variable base_url on line number 2 to set your homepage URL. Suppose your homepage URL is http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/erdos/ then modify the assignment to the following
    $base_url = "http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/erdos/";
    Be careful not to omit the forward slash after the username (in this case erdos)
  2. Dont close the file yet ! Give your webpage a nice title by modifying line number 8. Suppose you want the title to be Homepage of Paul Erdos, then modify the line to the following
    <title>Homepage of Paul Erdos</title>
  3. Change the header message for your homepage by opening the file menu.inc and changing line number 19. Suppose you wish the header message to be Welcome to my Webpage then change line 19 to the following
    print "Welcome to my Webpage";
  4. The template contains three pages - and index page, a page to store your personal details and one to publish your contact details. These are the files index.php, about.php and contact.php respectively. Open these respective files and edit them to put in your content. You can put in any HTML tags/structured elements/links in these files. Be sure to put content only between the delimiters
    <!-- begin content -->

    <!-- end content -->
  5. If you wish to add more pages (or remove some existing ones) then you need to edit the file menu.inc. For every page that you wish to add - give the page a title (say NewPage) and a filename (say new.php) and modify the variable menu_items in the file menu.inc (line number 2 onward) from the existing to the following
    $menu_items = array("Home"=>"index",
                    "About Me"=>"about",
                    "Contact"=>"contact"
                    "NewPage"=>"new" );

    Take the file skeleton.php, make a copy and name it new.php and put all the content you want to put in. Also (IMPORTANT) modify the variable current_page on line number 2 to set it to the name you gave this page
    $current_page = "NewPage";
Apart from this, the template offers a lot of customizations for those with a little knowledge of PHP and CSS
  1. You can change the background image by replacing the file background.png with your own background image. The image should be of size 800 x 600 pixels.
  2. You can change the header image by replacing the file header.png with your own header image. The image should be of size 674x 90 pixels.
  3. You can even have the header image/header message change from page to page - try out your PHP skills on this - most of the code to do this is already present in the file menu.inc.
  4. You can place a footer in your webpage by modifying the file footer.inc.
  5. You can change background colors etc by modifying the CSS file - be sure to modify both the CSS files otherwise your webpage will look different on different browsers. Suppose you want the background color to be blue, then change line number 2 in the files style-moz.css and style-ie.css to
    background-color:#0000ff;
    Look up how to encode your favorite color in HEX on the net.

Acknowledgements

The original template was designed by Ramprasad Saptharishi.