Web Site Home Page

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This article is intended for TNG site administrators who do not know how to build arbitrary HTML or PHP pages. This article is relevant only if you install TNG in a subfolder, and as a result, you need a separate home page for your website. Read the first few paragraphs of Home Pages - Fundamentals for more explanation.

Using Microsoft Word to Create a Web Page

Microsoft likes to think of Word as an all-purpose tool, and has blurred the lines between web pages and Word documents. So you can use Word to create web pages. I don't often recommend Word as a web page creation tool, since

  • Word documents saved as Web pages usually don't come out looking quite the way you wanted, and
  • Word adds an unbelievable number of invisible, special-purpose and/or Microsoft-specific HTML to documents saved as HTML, and they frequently get in the way.

Still, if all you want is a very simple web like the ones just below, Word can get you there without you having to know any HTML.

Two Web Site Home Pages

Note that the first web page above uses very basic text, though it does center the heading, and include a hyperlink. You can certainly use fonts and colors and paragraph formatting as you want. The second web page above uses Word Art (with effects that are barely visible at this resolution) to make the heading more interesting.

In both cases, the document was created a a regular Word document, and then "Saved As" HTML. All the "special" knowledge about Word that you need is:

  1. To create a hyperlink (in any Word document), highlight the text that you want to be underlined (i.e. the text that invokes the hyperlink), and click control-k. You'll be prompted for the web address that the hypperlink will take a user to.
  2. To save a Word document as HTML, simply select "Save As", and then select "Web page (.htm, .html) as the document type. Word will automatically convert your document to HTML. It will also take any images inside your Word document, and save them as separate image files. Do not simply change the file extension to .htm or .html while still saving the file as a Word document. Be sure to change the file type inside Word's Save As menu. (Once you've saved a document as HTML, you won't have to convert it to HTML each time you edit and save it.)
  3. When saving a Word document as HTML, keep the filename simple, without spaces, and, in particular, if you want it to be a "home page", call it index.html.
  4. In general don't try to edit HTML documents created by other programs with Word. Word will definitely add all kinds of strange HTML to the document, and will likely mess it up a bit.
  5. One you have converted your file to HTML, you will need to upload it to a web server, just as you need to upload the PHP files that make up the bulk of TNG. If the Word document you converted to HTML contained images, you'll need to upload those image files, too.

An Invisible Redirection Page

If you don't have any content on your server other than your TNG site, or anything to say on your web server home page, you can create a redirection page that will automatically load your TNG home page (at, say, www.mywebsite.com/family) when someone goes to your "parent" web site (at www.mywebsite.com or just mywebsite.com). To accomplish this, you need to use a text editor (Notepad, textedit, Notepad++, etc.) to enter this information:

<html>
<head>
  <meta HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0; URL=genealogy/"> 
  <title>Family Tree Redirection</title>
</head>
<body>
You should be redirected to <a href="genealogy/">my family page</a> in a moment or two.
<br>Please follow the link above if you aren't taken there automatically.
</body>
</html>

Note that

  1. the 0 immediately after CONTENT=" is the number of seconds that the web page is supposed to delay before redirecting to a new page..
  2. the expression genealogy/' refers to a page that is stored at the genealogy subfolder of your websierver. If your TNG site is at a different folder on your server, replace genealogy with your TNG folder name.
  3. In the first reference to genealogy/, there is supposed to be a double quote mark after genealogy/, but not before. The entire expression "0; URL=genealogy/" is quoted.
  4. In the second reference to genealogy/, there are supposed to be double quote marks both before and after genealogy/.
  5. You may change the phrase "Family Tree Redirection" if you wish. That is the title of the redirection page. Since the redirection page should disappear immediately, it's title is basically irrelevant.
  • Similarly, the two sentences starting with "You should be redirected" should be irrelevant, as the redirection page should disappear immediately. But if, for some reason, your web browser decides not to follow the redirection automatically, those two sentences will be displayed, and will contain a hyperlink to your TNG site.

More complex home pages

Note that, in the two home pages created by Word and shown above, there are links to other content. You may include as many links, and as much text, as you want in your Word HTML document. You can also, as noted above, include images and styled text.

But if you want to create a "real" HTML document, then you'll need to know something about HTML. Many HTML tutorials are available online, including

You can also search for "HTML tutorial" or maybe "Create simple web page" for other tutorials and help pages.

Related Links

Home Pages - Fundamentals

Web Site Home Page

Home Pages - Getting Started

Home Pages - Multi-Language

WebApps - The Least You Need To Know

How TNG builds a page