This is the rough initial version. There is a great deal of tidying up left to do before it is fit to go out in the world, and in all probability there are any number of mistakes. Let me know what needs to be changed, corrected, added.

Chapter 2 - the first pages

When you click on a site such as www.website.xx or whatever, the web site opens with a web page which is usually called www.website.xx/index.html. This index page, as it's generally known, is the opening page of the web site; it will have a number of links - in the form of buttons, photographs, drawings or whatever - which you select with your mouse to lead you to the other pages of the web site.

These web pages can have links leading to other parts of the same page, to other pages, to a particular place on another page, or back to the index page. A typical web site will allow you to navigate, i.e. select different links, from place to place and from page to page or perhaps even to other web sites at the press of a mouse button.

Most web site design programs allow you to design each page in turn, test each page in turn, load each page in turn on to the provider's hard disk and then see how each page in turn behaves. You give a name to each page, and design the links to lead from the index page to all the other pages.

DFM2HTML takes a different approach. When you start a new project in DFM2HTML, it automatically opens a page called index. This makes sense, since most providers insist that you call the opening page of the web site index although occasionally providers allow you to use another name.

So far DFM2HTML does the same as any other web page design program. However, now comes the interesting part. If you want to add a second page to the project, the new page becomes part of the index page, a sort of child page if the index page is the parent. Indeed, the child page can itself have children - what you might call grandchild pages - and even great-grandchild pages The official name for this sort of arrangement is called nesting, and nesting is a very important part of the DFM2HTML program. In a way, everything in the DFM2HTML program - pages, panels, pictures, text and links - is contained or nested; there are no loose bits.

To see how this works in practice, let's begin by opening our first project. Select File>New and a lovely white page opens; the name index

is displayed in the dropdown box in the icon bar at the top of the screen. Now select File>Save and, when prompted, call the project PageNesting and save it in a folder where you can find it easily. The DFM2HTML program will automatically give it a *.dfm extension, so from now on it's called PageNesting.dfm

Go to the tabs below the Design Area and select the one called {Image}. On the left of the Parameter Panel you will then see three buttons; you select the bottom one, which is called {From colour}; after which the =Colour Transparency Wizard= opens. Select the {Main Colour} button in the middle of the Wizard and you find yourself looking at a large square on the left with lots and lots of colours.

The immediate temptation is to choose your favourite colour (to match your living room wallpaper) but you must be firm with yourself. Most browsers (and monitors) will attempt to reproduce the colour you selected but don't always quite succeed. Often this doesn't matter, but if you have a picture or a logo that you want to blend into a background, getting the colour right may be important. So the best method is to select what is called a safe colour. It also helps speed up loading.

Look at the little icons just above the big display of colours and there, on the far right, is a little icon which you select (it doesn't seem to have a name, poor thing). This displays a range of colours suitable for various operating systems, as shown in the dropdown list, one of which is called Web Safe Colours, which is what you select. If you then select any of the colours on display, you may be pretty sure that you will use a colour that will be accurately reproduced on 95% of all computer screens. Let's choose a nice bright yellow.

Now I've suggested that you choose a safe colour; to make sure that the background of a logo or picture will blend in with the colour of your page you have to know exactly what that colour is. To find out the parameters of the colour, look at the horizontal slides to the right of the colour window and you'll see the colour specified as an RGB (Red, Green and Blue) colour which most graphic design programs can accept.

Select {Apply} and you will return to the =Colour Transparency Wizard=; there is a slide about half-way down to set transparency - make sure that the slide is pushed all the way to the right, and then select {OK} to go back to your index page, which is now yellow all over.

Now select, from the icon bar at the top of the screen, the first icon from the left, an icon called {Page Control}, and then select anywhere in the