Web Design help/guidelines

We have many members designing some of our project pages, or wanting to learn web design for their own sake. Here are some pointers, links, etc to help, as well as some requested guidelines for design of pages intended to go on our web site.

HTML editors

There are many programs out there to create web pages for you.

The simplest way is to use your favorite text editor (Notepad, emacs, etc) and code your HTML directly (see references below). Most likely free.
Dreamweaver by Macromedia. (commercial product) $$
Front Page by Microsoft. (commercial product) $$
Many word processors (like MS Word) will save documents as HTML. They may not be as full-featured, and quite hoestly they produce some gnarly HTML code, but they work, and most people already have access to one.
.....There are certainly many other ways as well.

HTML and Style Sheets

The HTML 4.01 specification. Great as a reference for all tags.
Some tutorials on HTML, style sheets, javascript, etc.
Another guide on style sheets.
Want to see how "correct" your web page is? Use HTML TIDY to check your HTML for bugs.
Yet more tutorials.

Image size vs. download speed

Reduce your image size so your pages will download faster. Remember, most of your audience may have only 56k modems. Just in case you don't follow the link, remember to limit your images to 72dpi. This is as much as most monitors display. Beyond 72dpi you are just adding in information that will be thrown away and just make the page take much longer to display.
Want to know how long that image will take to download? Use this downloadspeed estimator.

Guidelines for pages for this site

If you are using Front Page (gack) PLEASE do whatever it is you have to do to get it to not set all the file paths to your local directory (eg. Joe Smith/My files/Web stuff/images/pic1.jpg). Instead this ref should probably just be pic1.jpg or at most images/pic1.jpg.
Please do not put spaces in file names. Use an underscore (_) instead to separate words. eg. Ski_trip_pic.jpg.
Please limit image sizes. 40k REALLY is big enough to look good for most images. Save your image as a jpg and crank that quality down to 60%, 50%, even 40%. You'll be suprised how good the images still look in a browser, and your pages will download much faster.
We have a style sheet we use for many of the top-level pages. You may include this style into your page by adding the line
<LINK rel="stylesheet" TYPE="text/css" HREF="http://www.raleighjaycees.org/main_style.css">
into the HEAD section of your page.
For any project pages (eg. Haunted House), please design your page to live in a subdirectory (eg. Haunted_House). Make any subpages of this project page be relative to this subdirectory.
Do not put a full path in your hrefs (eg. http://www.raleighjaycees.org/Haunted_House/coupon.html). Simply make the href be coupon.html. This allows us to rearrange things much more easily.