Section 41. Set Page Properties

41. Set Page Properties

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

6 About Proper HTML Coding

SEE ALSO

8 Add a Title and Head

Most things you want to do to a web pagesuch as editing text and adding picturesinvolve working on the page, sort of like painting on a canvas. But what if you want to change the color of the canvas or replace it with velvet so that you can do Elvis or the dogs playing poker? On a web page, there is a split between the content on the page and the attributes of the page itself. With Composer, setting the page attributes is easily done.

1.	Enter Page Title and Properties Select Page Title and Properties from the Format menu. The Page Properties dialog box opens and gives you areas to enter text for the Title, Author , and Description of the page. The Title field contains the text that appears at the top of the browser window when the page is viewed . A good title that describes what the page is about can help your viewers find your pages in search engines. If you just put your name or company name in the title for every page, you are not giving viewers or search engines much information about your site. Keeping your titles accurate and unique for each page in your site makes it easier to find information on your site. The Author field is for you to enter your name or contact information so that people can find you. It is rarely used, but it does come up in search engines. The Description field enables you to add a summary of the content of the page; this synopsis is used by some search engines to display a brief description of the page in the search results. A good page description can help your viewers find your page just like a good title can do.
2.	Choose Format, Page Colors and Background Select Page Colors and Background from the Format menu. The Page Colors and Background dialog box appears. By default, Composer gives your page no background image and leaves the colors of the text and links to the default of the browser. 41. Set Page Properties TIP There are advantages in leaving the link colors at the browser's default because they are high contrast and easy to read. Also, they have significance to the viewer of the page; most people know that a piece of blue text with an underline indicates a link. When the link is purple, most viewers understand the link has been visited.
3.	Change the Color of the Active Links Now you can edit the colors for each type of text on the page. Editing the text colors in the page properties adds code to the page only oncenot to every block of text to which you want to apply the color changewhich reduces the size of the page and decreases the time it takes to download the page. In the Page Colors and Background dialog box, click on the Use Custom Colors radio button and then click the button next to the Active Link text option. (Alternatively, click the color button for whatever type of text you want to change, such as Normal Text or Visited Link text.) The Active Link Color dialog box opens, with a table of the colors from which you can select. When you click one of the colors, it shows you the name of the color in hexadecimal in the text area at the bottom of the dialog box. If you know the color you want to use, you can type its hexadecimal code directly in the text box and click OK to set your color choice. Otherwise, click the color in the table and click OK to return to the Page Colors and Background dialog box. Notice that the dialog box has been updated to show the color you selected as the color for the type of text you were editing.

KEY TERM

Hexadecimal Hex is a system of numbering with a base of 16 rather than the base 10 with which we are familiar. Without going into too much detail on why computers like base 16 numbers , some explanation is necessary. A hex number looks like "#3366FF". The pound sign indicates to HTML that the following six numbers and letters are to be used as a single set of three two-digit numbers. The first set of two digits is the value for red, the second set is the value for green, and the third set is for blue. Together they tell the computer to display one color made up from red, green, and blue.

In hex, when you run out of the digits 09, instead of going on to 10, you go to a, and then b, c, d, e, and f. Thus, counting in hex is as follows : 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F. B equals 11 and E equals 14.

The sets of digits go from 00 to FF with 00 equaling zero and FF equaling 256. With 256 colors possible for red, green, and blue each, there are 256 ³ colors possible. For those of you who aren't math heads, that is 16,777,216 possible colors.