Hello!

I am very new to web-site design, and am learning slowly. I first designed a little community website in Publisher. You can see it at www.canamica.com. While looking at various questions and answers to solve some minor issues with the site (like that it was always to one side) I learned that 'real website developers' write their own HTML code and use CSS style sheets and all that good stuff. I've been learning how to do that in w3 schools, and thought I'd start by converting my site. All was going well, until I tried to put in the cute title I had made using word-art. If I save it as a picture, it comes out all not-smooth, with jaggedy edges on the letters and much darker colours, despite my attempts at setting high resolution, and no matter what type (GIF, JPG, or PNG) I use. I tried to read the web-page HTML produced by word & publisher for the word-art, but it's unreadable!

Any suggestions? The word-art has two colours flowing in a gradient, a nice curve, and a rounded font I liked. Nothing in the CSS or HTML tutorials on w3 suggests how I can recreate that!

This is also my first post, so if it's in the wrong forum, just let me know that, and tell me where to go!
Thanks,
Anna L.

You are going to have to re-create that title as a graphic. To stop the jaggies, you'll have to be sure you have anti-aliasing set, especially if you want to make it transparent.

Converting from Publisher will cost you a LOT of time. Better to set up your page framework in a new file, then copy and paste just the content from the old into the new.

Dreamweaver has a utility called "clean up Word HTML" that does a pretty fair job of stripping out all the MS garbage code.

Thanks a lot!

What is anti-aliasing? I don't have a graphics program, really...I usually just use word and paint. Is there a good one you can recommend? Is Dreamweaver inexpensive or not?

Anti-aliasing
The process by which a computer application, namely an image editing program, can smooth out the edges around a graphic to eliminate the "jaggies" which can appear in digitized images. The smoothing which occurs is a blending process between the foreground color of the graphic and the background color around the graphic. When done poorly, graphics will look muddy around the edges or have a halo effect.

www.wizzywigg.com/lev2_glossary.htm


Try using Gimp which is a free image-editing program using which you can create your titles.
Dreamweaver is on the expensive side of things, but is an essential and must-have tool for web designers.

Dreamweaver is on the expensive side of things, but is an essential and must-have tool for web designers.

No, it isn't. While I've been using DW since version 1, it is NOT a 'must have tool'. It's actually NOT a good tool for beginners as left on it's own it creates really BAD code. The best tool for a beginner is a text editor - like Notepad. Learn to code BY HAND, learn HTML and CSS from the ground up, then you can use a TOOL like DW effectively to speed up your web building process.

There are many FREE or much more reasonably priced html editors, check out Coffee Cup.