Global formatting options

Like most web authoring systems, Carrelet uses templates to create individual pages. The templates themselves are built into the system and cannot be modified by end users. However, Carrelet has been designed so that you can 'mix and match' different components of the page design to produce a large variety of page designs from the basic templates.

Page appearance

The most basic setting is the page layout. This sets the fundamental structure of the web page, such as the position of the logo, the position and type of menu and so on.

The presentation of the page layout is controlled by a style sheet. This in turn is generated according to the global settings for colour, fonts and text size.

The easiest way to decide upon the right combination of settings is to experiment! All the global settings are retroactive: in other words, you can change your mind as often as you like, and all the pages in your account will be rewritten to take those changes into account. If you are new to web page design, you may wish to take the following points into account:

• Not all systems have all fonts. Carrelet font sets have been designed to work on a reasonably wide range of platforms, and the pages will always display something, but if, for example, you opt for a font set including Impact (a relatively common Microsoft font), and the visitor to your site does not have that font installed, his navigator will substitute another font, which may look quite different.
• Not all systems render text at the same size. For example, Internet Explorer tends to display text at a larger size than Netscape Navigator or Mozilla. So if you are designing your website using Netscape, err on the small side, or your text may look huge to visitors using Internet Explorer.
• Some visitors may be visually impaired, or may have older equipment, smaller monitors and so on.

Webmaster best practice is to test websites on a range of browsers on a range of platforms. But, to keep things in perspective, the options provided with Carrelet are generally fairly safe, except when the names suggest otherwise (the minute text size option means just that, for example)!

Navigation extras

Also on the global settings page are a couple of check boxes which, if ticked, add more 'furniture' to your website.

The all text option adds an extra menu option which, when selected, produces a text-only printer-friendly summary of the account. This can be useful for some categories of site (the Carrelet tutorial (Cliquez ici) is a good example). However, it does not work very well for sites that depend on the images, or where many of the 'pages' are in fact links or 'cards' databases.

The in-page navigation option adds an extra menu at the top and bottom of each page, with links to the main headings on that page. This can be useful for sites with lots of text on each page. Note that only top-level headings (1+ in formatted text mode) are indexed, and that the in-page menus do not appear unless there are at least 2 top-level headings on the page.