The world of HTML

HTML is still widely used for creating web pages. The reason is simple. Not every page in our site has dynamic contents. Some pages are static because of their content. The `About us' page is a good example. The contents of this page will rarely change and we do not need any user input on this page. In fact, many such static pages can exist in web sites even in this age of dynamic web applications. Using HTML is the easiest way to create static pages.

VWD Express provides a unique method for creating static pages even if we do not know enough HTML. The design view of a page can be used just like a word processor, such as MS-Word. With the aid of the Formatting toolbar, we can create the page with ease and the VWD generates the equivalent HTML in the background. We can view this HTML code by switching to the source view.

Let us create our home page in the design view of the VWD IDE:

Open the project. From the solution explorer, open the Default.aspx page (our home page) if it is not visible in the IDE.

Switch to the design view of the page. Delete the existing text inside the Content box.

Look for the Table control in the HTML section of the ToolBox. Drag the control and drop it inside the Content box. A table with three rows and three columns is now added to the page.

Click inside any one of the cells in the first row. From the Layout menu, select the Select->Row option to select the first row.

While the row is selected, choose the Merge cells option from the Layout menu. This will merge the three cells of the first row, creating a larger, single cell.

Click inside this single cell. From the Layout menu, choose Select->Cell. Now from the Format menu, select Style... option. The Style Builder dialog box will open up.

In the Style Builder dialog box, click on the Background tab. Select a Background color for the cell from the drop down list or by clicking on the button next to it, which will display even more color choices. Click the OK button to proceed.

Put some heading text inside this cell. We can format the text using the buttons on the formatting toolbar.

We can put various elements in the other cells of the table. News items, featured products and new additions are some examples that we can show on our home page. The important thing is that we can do all this without writing any HTML at all. The formatting is done using the Formatting toolbar and the Style Builder dialog box. Adding images are as simple as dragging and dropping them on the page!

Here is one example of our homepage:

The use of tables is a preferred method for formatting the web page in different sections. We can design the About page and the Download page using the VWD IDE's design mode. The download page can be like this:

If we look at the source view of the page, we will see the HTML generated by the VWD IDE.