Defining Web Properties

The General tab allows you to define such things as the title of your page, author information, key words to use in search engines, and a description of your page that will show up in a search engine result.

The icon option allows you to set a small image that will show in the address bar of your viewers browser. If the viewer bookmarks your site, that icon will also show next to the name and description of your site in his/hers bookmark

At the time PI 7 was released, this icon option only worked for Internet Explorer. It may or may not work in newer versions of Netscape and Opera.

With the Image File tab, you can set how you want PI to handle images in your page.

The Optimizer Settings will tell PI to save your images in a format you choose. The background setting is grayed out here since we are not using an image for our background.

Since PI creates your page as a table, you can set how you want images in cells to be saved (more on this later).The file naming pattern will let you customize how PI will name your images as it saves them.

The bottom part of this tab controls where your images will go once they are saved. PI will, by default, create and save images to a sub folder named "images" in the main folder of your site. You can rename this folder by deleting the line and typing in your own name. If you uncheck this box, PI will save your images in the same folder as your page.

The last check box is used when you link a file to your web page. If you are using the same image on several web pages (banners, button bars, etc.) uncheck this so PI doesn't create a duplicate of the image. More on this later.

PhotoImpact creates a web page by putting it in a table. The Slice tab allows you to set how PI generates the table. If you were to uncheck the Enable slicing box, PI would merge all the objects on your page and save it as one big image.

Slicing your page allows you to create a table and cells. This is ideal for more advanced effects like swapping images, pop up menus and other uses. We'll cover slicing and this tab in another lesson as we move forward.

For now, let's leave this tab as is. We can change it later if we need to.

The final tab, HTML, let's us define how PI formats the code it will generate. Here you can set PI to use upper or lower case for tags and attributes, and what keys you can use to create line breaks and indents. For our purposes, we will not need to change these.

The Output section tells PI how to set up links in your page(s). A relative URL is a link from one page to another page (or image) within your site. A relative URL tells the browser to look in the same site for the file or page.

If you uncheck this box, you would have to enter links manually when doing your page. Let's leave it checked.

PI will also create code conforming to XHTML. Not important for our purposes.

The Web Properties box can be accessed at anytime during the page creation process and we'll use it from time to time throughout these lessons. Now! Let's get started creating!