llizard's gallery of ASCII-art and ASCII-animation ^^7^^^7^%<

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When you first open up an account with CWahi and go to your website address, you may see a message saying that your account cannot be viewed or is not found or a message saying "Access to that file/directory is forbidden" or perhaps the following:

To have your site load up automatically, your main file has to have one of the following names (in order):

index.html
index.htm
index.shtml
index.php

Remember: Make sure the file names use small letters only, no capitals!

In the CWahi forum, Jenn wrote, "Just to clarify, the index page is what you would consider a "start" page, or your first page that you want people to see."

Please note that on the free CWahi accounts, folders without index files cannot be easily accessed. If your visitors try to directly access a folder that does not have an index file, they WILL see the message "Access to that file/directory is forbidden".

The index page is the "start page" for whatever folder it is in. ie: each folder can have its own index page.

For instance, you may have a folder that you don't want people wandering around to be able to see all the files that are there. To prevent that, you can create an index page for it. Here is an example of "hiding" files from general view:

• Example one
• Example two
• Example folder WITHOUT an index page

The advantage to having an index page in each folder is that your visitors can find their way to your actual homepage.

• my home page

The index page is the "start page" for your website: the page that is seen when people go to your site's address.

To create your index page, open up a text editor (notepad). Type the words "Welcome to my webpage" (or whatever information you'd like everyone to see) and save the file as "index.html". Upload the file via ASCII to the main folder in your account.

Now go to http://yourusername.cwahi.net/ and your site will have started to be yours.

On the index page, as well as any information about your website, you'll probably want to show a list of links to the various pages and folders on your site. Here is an example of how to do that:

<ul>
<li><a href="/NameofFileEXACTLY.html">title of link</a></li>
<li><a href="/FOLDERname/">title of a folder</a></li>
<li><a href="/FOLDERname/FileName.html">title of page in a folder</a></li>
<li><a href="/anotherFOLDERname/FileName.html">title of page in another folder</a></li>
</ul>

The <ul> at the beginning tells the computer where the start of your unordered list is. The <li> is placed at the beginning of each listed item. And</li> is placed at the end of each item. The final </ul> goes at the very end of the list to tell the computer that the list is finished.

Each link begins with <a href=""> and ends with </a>. Note the leading slash after the first quotation mark in the example link. This instructs the browser to add "http://yourdomainname.com/" to the beginning, causing the link to work on any page of your website at all.

N.B. File names are case sensitive. You must enter them into your coding eXacTly aS they aPpear.

You can have many folders on your website and just as many index pages. The index page is the "start page" for whatever folder it is in. ie: each folder can have its own index page.

For instance, you may have a folder that you don't want people wandering around to be able to see all the files that are there. To prevent that, you can create an index page for it. Simply type the folder name on the index file, along with a link to your homepage. This way, you control what your visitors can see when going to your site.

To create the index page for a folder (aka directory) - let's say that in this case, it's your image folder, open up a text editor (notepad). Type the words "My Images" (or whatever information you'd like everyone to see) and save the file as "index.html". Upload the file via ASCII to your "images" folder in your account.

If you do not have an images folder, you can easily create it in the file manager. Simply log in to your cwahi.net account and select "file manager" from the menu near the top of the page.

Then click on "New dir" and type images into the window that appears beside the words "New directory name". Please remember that the names are case sensitive. ("Images" is different from "images")

Now click on the green arrow near the top of the page and the new folder will be created.

Here is an example of what the coding for your images folder might look like:

<h1>My Images</h1>

<ul>
<li><a href="/images/myhouse.jpg">My house</a></li>
<li><a href="/images/mygarden.jpg">My garden</a></li>
<li><a href="/images/myfamily.jpg">My family</a></li>
<li><a href="/">My homepage</a></li>
</ul>

Make sure the new index file has been uploaded via ascii to the images folder. Now go to http://YourUserName.cwahi.net/images/ and you will see a page entitled "My Images" along with the list of links to any images you would like people to easily open. Alternately, you can leave out the links and simply type "My Images".

Please remember to keep backups of your site on your computer. You never know when inexplicable crashes can occur.

I hope that helps!

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ejm                  | \

For more information about HTML and cascading style sheets, please consult W3Schools Introduction to HTML, W3Schools Introduction to CSS, HTML Dog: HTML Beginner Tutorial and/or HTML Dog: CSS Beginner Tutorial.

Many many thanks go to browsershots.org for the fantastic service they offer of testing web design in different browsers and showing the results with screenshots.

© llizard 2009, 2010, 2012

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