Re: Our ongoing struggle to revamp our website

[musicmonkey]

Note I did say ongoing. Our son kindly got us started with a site in Frontpage and we are learning as we go along. Since it was created we have made quite a few improvements but we have a long list of ideas taken from advice given on here that we are yet to tackle.

The immediate problem is that we made a photogallery page and this works fine on our web page but on trying to load it on the website we had error messages for all of the images on the photogallery page.

It quoted the file number and name and said 'Permission denied. (Filename accept).

Can anyone suggest how I can put this right? Thanks

Musicmonkey www.normandy-gite-web.com

[musicmonkey]

Sorry everyone. Tried to make some changes and now website messed up even more - so its back to the drawing board. Check back in a day or so.
Think positive. May sort it out without help. (Yeah likely!)

[paolo]

Unfortunately, Tony and Brooke, who could sort this out for you, are not around at the moment.

You could try changing the name of the pics, as they all have a space in their name. The space is rendered as '%20' in the html, and this may be why the pics are not showing. Try removing the space from one of the image names, and see if that one shows. I really don't know if this could cause it but this is the first thing I would try.

[musicmonkey]

Thanks Paolo,

We are really getting fed up. Firstly, we had realised that we had numbers in the photo names, so we deleted those, only to find that, as you suggested, the spaces were a problem.

The files have now been renamed and the slide show recreated but we had to manually delete the old files and the old file names must still exist somewhere in the photogallery because we can see them when the files are being uploaded by the FTP program but can't find them in the directory. We have got the hidden system files options switched on, so its not that the files are hidden from view.

[charles]

Are you using the built-in Frontpage file upload feature or a separate FTP program? If it's the latter the following info I found on the web may be of use:

If you must use an outside FTP program, you will need to make sure that you transfer the files in the hidden folders as well. To see these hidden folders in FrontPage, go to Tools > Web Settings. Click the Advanced Tab and check the "show hidden files and folders" box. To see these hidden folders in Windows Explorer, go to Tools > Folder Options. Click the Views tab and select the "show hidden files and folders" option. You will then be able to view some folders like "_themes," "_fpclass," and "_derived." These folders contain the files that you need for your web site to display correctly.

Source: vividoffice.com/support/fptut_serverissues.asp

Otherwise are you absolutely certain that the pictures are in the /photogallery/photo172/ directory?

Cheers,
Charles

[musicmonkey]

Thank you Charles for taking the trouble to respond.

In fact, we can see those files already, so that is not the problem unfortunately.

[livinginitaly]

Hi musicmonkey,

Sorry to have to report that i'm unable to get to the bottom of this error either. Everything i try to type in gets 'bounced' to the BT Homepage, so i can't get a look at the file structure.

One thing i would say though, is that despite 'what is says in on the box', Microsoft Front Page cannot design a website that is either 'user', 'search engine' or 'operator' friendly ..... and i think you're struggling with software that is never going to achieve great results

Take a look at this free software. It's aimed at people who don't want to learn who to 'code' a website, they just want it to 'happen'!

You can log in using a 'hidden' login link (just mouseover beneath the 'guestbook' link on the left and click) when the password prompt comes up, enter 'admin'.

You'll then be able to see how easy it is to amend the text.

http://www.cmsimple.webworks-uk.net

You can choose from literally hundreds of Templates, here's a good source of free ones.

http://www.websitetemplate.org/

Maybe it's not the answer you really wanted ..... but personally, i think it's a viable alternative.

[Hanorah]

Hi Music Monkey the image is pointing to the following path

http://www.btinternet.com/~garry.saunde ... Lounge.JPG

You say that you deleted the numbers so the problem could be that the pictures are actually in

http://www.btinternet.com/~garry.saunde ... Lounge.JPG

and the photo172 reference is the problem. The way you can check is on FTP see if you are uploading your pictures to just

Photogallery

rather than

Photogallery
Photo172

ie if the images are not in a sub folder on the remote site called Photo172 then you would not be able to see them.

I hope this makes sense. If this is the error you will need to either manually change the links to the correct address or create another sub folder called Photo172 under Photogallery so that the path is correct.

Of course it might not be this problem at all so hopefully I will not course more confusion but you never know. Hope it works out.

[musicmonkey]

Take a look at this free software. It's aimed at people who don't want to learn who to 'code' a website, they just want it to 'happen'!

You can log in using a 'hidden' login link (just mouseover beneath the 'guestbook' link on the left and click) when the password prompt comes up, enter 'admin'.

You'll then be able to see how easy it is to amend the text.

http://www.cmsimple.webworks-uk.net

You can choose from literally hundreds of Templates, here's a good source of free ones.

http://www.websitetemplate.org/

Maybe it's not the answer you really wanted ..... but personally, i think it's a viable alternative.

Tony, I really am not technically minded and I'm embarrassed to say that even your advice given here is beyond me at present. I have got as far as downloading a template, having downloaded the supporting system but am now stuck! Am I meant to see boxes with no pictures or text and if so what do I do next?

I am so frustrated by this as I was prepared to have a go at using a simple package to recreate a website from scratch. Every else seems able to make such lovely websites with little or no experience. Did they all go through this?

[livinginitaly]

No problem, if you'd be willing to email me your username and password ..... i'd be happy to set up the framework for you.

Did you log into the demo on my site? what did you think?

[musicmonkey]

Tony,
Thank you very much for your kind offer. We have finally sorted out our photogallery - hooray! It appears we had some extra jpg images in the web page that weren't in the gallery. Not really sure why this caused a problem but after hours and hours we are sorted (for now).

As we are all 'web sited' out at the moment I won't take you up on the offer at the moment but perhaps at some time in the future we might be interested if you are able to help at that stage.

If we are feeling very brave (and with time on our hands) we might have a go at Dreamweaver as we have that option.

Thanks again

[paolo]

Every else seems able to make such lovely websites with little or no experience. Did they all go through this?

Yes! It's why it's time-consuming to learn this stuff. You don't know why something has gone wrong and it can take ages to find out, by chance. But it's al part of the learning curve.

Most people don't have Tony on hand either so we're the lucky ones on this forum.

[tansy]

and that is why I am so very grateful to Tony & Paolo....I've tried in the past and quite frankly did my head in....my heartfelt sympathy to you musicmonkey...all the encouragement I can give at the moment is it will be worth it

Good luck

[Christine Kenyon]

Hi Musicmonkey. We've all been through the "web-site-outed" stage - and have come through smiling ...... eventually! So please don't give up it is worth it in the end.

I was fortunate in that I could call on a web-enthusiast just down the road. You're even luckier - you got Paolo, Tony and loads of others wanting to help you!

I've had a quick look at your photo gallery and the pictures came up fine. You have got some extremely good quality pictures to work with - and some sunshine in the background!

Hang on in there and don't be afraid to ask - nor to take up people's offers of help.

[vrooje]

Musicmonkey,

Don't worry -- as the others have said, everyone goes through this process at one time or another. I'm fortunate that a rental property website was not my first website: I had several years' of worthless websites to tinker around with before having to apply my HTML knowledge to a site that actually needed to make money.

Your photo gallery is a great idea and I like your pictures a lot. I'm glad you got the other issues fixed! I have a couple of suggestions, if that's all right. If not, please ignore this post until you're ready again to confront the issue!

First, in my browser your thumbnail images are all displayed on one line. I have a high monitor resolution (1280x1024), and I have to scroll to see not only all the thumbnails but also the enlarged image:


And here's what I would estimate the page would look like at 1024x768 resolution:


In that case, the user wouldn't even know to look for the enlarged image and might miss it entirely. The page title is also completely gone, and in 800x600 resolution the menu might also be cut off. You do instruct the user to scroll, but many people won't.

I think you could solve this issue by displaying the thumbnails in a grid, say a table with 4 rows (max 5 images each row). Frontpage ought to be able to do this pretty easily, but I haven't tried it in a long time.

Second, I noticed that sometimes there's a delay in displaying the image, presumably while the image loads. You could avoid this by having all the images load when the page is loaded. To do this you just manually insert a bit of javascript code into the page headers, and then tell the browser to load the images when it reads the <BODY> tag.

So, first step would be: in the code between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags, paste the following:

Code: Select all

<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
function MM_preloadImages&#40;&#41; &#123;

  var d=document; if&#40;d.images&#41;&#123; if&#40;!d.MM_p&#41; d.MM_p=new Array&#40;&#41;;

    var i,j=d.MM_p.length,a=MM_preloadImages.arguments; for&#40;i=0; i<a.length; i++&#41;

    if &#40;a&#91;i&#93;.indexOf&#40;"#"&#41;!=0&#41;&#123; d.MM_p&#91;j&#93;=new Image; d.MM_p&#91;j++&#93;.src=a&#91;i&#93;;&#125;&#125;

&#125;
//-->
</script>

Then, you call the function within the body tag: if your body tag initially has:

Code: Select all

<body bgcolor="#FFFFCC" text="#663366" link="#996699" vlink="#006666" alink="#339999">

and you wanted to add in a code snippet to tell it to load images img1.jpg, img2.jpg, and img3.jpg, the resulting new code would be:

Code: Select all

<body bgcolor="#FFFFCC" text="#663366" link="#996699" vlink="#006666" alink="#339999" onLoad="MM_preloadImages&#40;'img1.jpg','img2.jpg','img3.jpg'&#41;">

I know that is probably pretty complicated and you might not want to try it, but I thought of it while viewing your gallery and wanted to suggest it / get it down on the forum before I forgot it!

Let me know if you decide to do either of these things and want any help.

Cheers!