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Content > Free Stuff : File formats (coming soon)

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Collect together ALL of the material you have that could possibly be of use on the site. Photos, documents, graphics, brochures, press clippings - absolutely everything that might end up on the site, or even just help with ideas.

By now, you should know the overall look of your site - a theme, colour scheme or whatever. Apart from your own content, you'll also need other stuff if you want to make it look any good. If you're the creative type and have a lot of time on your hands, you can create everything you need yourself, right down to your own fonts. Life is short, but fret not - there are heaps of people out there on the web who waste their time to give you free stuff to make your website. Free fonts, free backgrounds & buttons, even entire free "schemes" if you're really lazy. So get some free stuff.

You will need to convert all of your own source material into the right format, size and resolution for your site. I'll cover that by type of content later, but the first step is to copy material you have in any digital format into your website/temp directory. You'll probably need to change their sizes, format etc so don't put them directly into one of the other sub-directories. I use a temp directory as a sort of "work in progress" and stockpile for material that I might use in the site. I don't upload this sub-directory onto the live site, but having it sitting in the same directory as the site on your local drive allows easy browsing of available material as you build.

If you don't have a reasonable graphics package, don't worry, you can get a trial of Paint Shop Pro - I'll cover that soon. And if you don't have a scanner, GET ONE! The cheapest flat-bed scanner will be good enough, and you'll use it all the time if you're getting into the web. I use mine far more than my printer.

Collecting all of the material you need can be pretty time consuming, which is why you need to have a fairly good body of material at this point before you proceed. You may only have 4 weeks to actually build the site if you use the "Dreamweaver" trial, and you don't want to be pfaffing about hunting for a font you like once the countdown has started.