To create a new page, you will simply choose File new and we are going to create a nice blank HTML page. Before you do anything else, it is good to get in a habit of saving your page as soon as you create it. This is because as you add, the images will create links. Those links will be relative to other pages in the site and until the pages saved it is hard for Expression Web to know where those are.
Now Expression Web has some features to manage that until you save a page. But I still think it is a good practice to always save a page as soon as you create it. Just cuts down on potential problems if things move or names change.
Notice that as I am saving this page, Expression Web is automatically offering to name it Default. That is because the main page of your website should always be called either Default or Index. Now, which of those two names you choose depends on your web server and the hosting service that you are using.
Now not on Expression Web, it is really up to you. So by default, Expression Web saves the first page in a new site and names it Default. And for now I am just going to let it do that. If you are not use to the word Default and it was confusing to hear me say by default, it is default. Those of you are use to hearing that probably did not even noticed. But if you are not sure what I mean by default, I will use that a lot in this training. It is a common thing for us geeks to say, when we mean “what a program does if you have not change any of the preferences or other settings to make it do something else?”
So if I say by default, Expression Web names a file Default but you can change it to Index. What I am saying is this is the way the program works if you do not change it. By the way, whether you should use Index or Default like I said, it depends on your hosting service so you should check with them. It all has to do with the way web servers are setup to deliver the first page in a site to a web browser. So if your server is set to deliver default.html, when a browser arise at the URL of your site, then that is what it should be named. If it is setup for Index, then you will need to set it that way. For the most part, windows servers use Default, UNIX and Linux servers use Index and some servers are setup either way.
And here is a slightly more advance tip, if you use Default or Index as the name of a file within a subfolder in your website. So if within the main folder of my site, I created another folder called Bubbles and inside that folder I created a default.html file, that would enabled me to send my visitors to a sub directory of my site more simply so they could just type myurl/bubbles instead of having to type myurl/bubbles plus the name of the file.html.
If the first file in the sub directory is default.html and your web server is setup to deliver that first to a browser, then that is all the address you will need is the name of the folder. And do not worry, it is not a problem to have two files with the same name within the site. You can have as many default.html files as you want within your website just make sure that each one is in a separate folder. You cannot have two files with the same name in the same folder.
And be careful when you are editing those files that you save them correctly into the correct folder because it is easy to overwrite one file with another when you use the same name over and over. But it is a nice handy trick if you want to make it easy to get the sub folders within your main site.
Of course, the rest of the files and folders in your website, you can name anything you like although it is best not to use spaces or special characters. So for example, you should not use punctuation marks, apostrophes, question marks, and things like that because many web servers will have trouble with those naming conventions as well. You should also avoid spaces in your file names but the exception to this in the way most developers get around it is to use the dash or the underscore so I will just type here so you will see what I mean.
This -name.html with the dash there would
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