ShopSite Quickstart Guide: Graphics

Now that Tina has the basic structure of her store set up, she is going to upload and place her graphics. She selects "media" from the button bar, which brings her to the media manager.

For uploading she has two options. If she is using Netscape Navigator 2.0 or higher, she can upload graphics directly through the media section of the back office. Hitting the "upload image" button will take her to a new page where she will see a button marked "browse". The browse button will bring up a window allowing her to find where she has the images stored on her hard drive. She will select them one at a time, each time having the opportunity to rename the file.

Need more info on FTPing?

Since Tina is using Microsoft Internet Explorer, she will need to ftp the images to the server. Even if she were using Netscape, she would probably want to ftp them anyway, because that way she can upload them all at once. The media manager page displays the path to the directory where images are stored, and Tina's provider told her the username and password she needs, all of which she saves into her FTP software. The ftp software is shareware that she received from her internet service provider. She then follows her software's instructions to upload her image files from her Hard Drive to her virtual server.

If you have a lot of files, you may want to give them long, descriptive names. Remember to separate words with underscore characters or hyphens. You can't have spaces in the filenames. Also remember to put a .gif or .jpg suffix at the end of each file name, depending on which type it is. For more information, see the graphics guide.

Tina might have saved some time and hassle if she'd added images first. That would allow her to visit each page and product creation page only once. Now, because she waited, she'll have to go back and add the images to the existing products. However, this gives her the chance to use the time-saving "power edit" feature.

In the "pages" section, Tina selects the pages she has graphics for by holding the control button and clicking on the names in the list, then she clicks on the "power edit" button. She then sees a list of the fields she can select to edit. This is the same list she saw when she added several new pages at once. The only field she wants to edit this time is the "graphic" field, so she selects it and hits "ok". This generates a page containing the name of each page she selected and a pull down menu to choose an image file. She picks the correct image for each page and hits ok. She repeats the process for her products, specifying an image for each.

Note: it is easy to add images anywhere on the page-- even when there's no pull-down menu to choose. By simply adding an HTML tag into your text where ever you'd like the graphic to be, your store can look much more professional. Try typing
<img src="media/myimage.gif">
where "myimage.gif" is the name of the image you sent to your graphics library.

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