Guestbook - Customizing the Look
From Hostbaby Wiki
Changing the look of guestbook.html
As you have already seen, when we created your account at Hostbaby, we made a file called "guestbook.html" that has everything you need to display your news entries.
Granted, it isn't pretty, but the functionality is there and you can edit the existing guestbook.html file with the instructions below to make it suit your tastes.
You can change all fonts, size, colors, and alignment with CSS stylesheets. There are links to resources at the bottom of this page. They're a great thing to get to know.
You can also change the text above the guestbook (where it presently says "Say hello! Introduce yourself!") as well as the text that prefixes the form entry fields. For example, let's say you want to change the text that currently says "Name:";
In the HTML code, it looks like this:
<tr>
<td>Name:</td>
<td><input type="text" name="gbname" size="32" maxlength="64"></td>
</tr>
Let's say you want to change the text that says "Name:" to "What's Your Name?:". In this case, you would change the text between the > and the < brackets in the second line as follows:
<tr>
<td>What's Your Name?:</td>
<td><input type="text" name="gbname" size="32" maxlength="64"></td>
</tr>
You can simply follow that logic through each of the form elements and change the text to reflect the personality of your site.
Changing the look and feel (fonts, size, colors, alignment) won't change the data in your guestbook. They're kept in two different places. This is important to understand. The actual names, email address and comments that your users enter is all kept as raw text in your own database. And now, to present it, you can choose any color scheme you want, and your news will be shown with that "theme".
It's a very cool way of working, and it's how XML and all future website technologies will work in the future, so you should learn a little something about it.
Here are some good links about CSS stylesheets:
- Effective Use of Style Sheets (useit.com)
- Robust CSS Tutorials (w3schools.com)
- good book about CSS (amazon.com)
- CSS homepage at world wide web consortium (w3.org)
FOR MORE HELP...
We have a bulletin board where you can not only ask any question there, but also see other people's questions and ideas, too!
The exact link for the Email Form section of the bulletin board is:
