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National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Goddard Space Flight Center

One NASA Look and Feel, Web Standards to the rescue.

Web Standards to the rescue. One NASA Look and Feel CSS TEMPLATES

Building Your Site

Introduction

Creating and maintaining a website with these templates is easy. These instructions will take you through the steps necessary to get started. But first, I would like to mention a few things to keep in mind when planning your website.

  • Evaluate your content and then organize it into as few logical groups as possible.
  • Keep the names for these sections as brief as possible while keeping them meaningful to the user. This is especially important to us because the placement and size of our navigation has been pre-determined.
  • When producing content for your site, brevity is your friend.
Changes
Before we get started it would be good to review the changes that appear in these templates. Note: Since the NASA Portal does not support a One Column Layout, although the previous templates provided a one column solution, one will has not been developed for this round of templates. If you currently use a one column layout from the previous set of templates, those pages will not be supported in the new templates. If you concern is about presenting pages that need more space due to tabular data, I strongly suggest that you use the Two Column Template.

What's all this PHP stuff?

You have probably noticed by now that this site is in PHP, which is a general purpose scripting language. But don't let this scare you. PHP is NOT a requirement to use these templates. These examples work just fine as normal html files without any backend programming or javascript. The reason I use PHP is to highlight one of the great features we gain by using Web Standards and CSS: the text only version. The "Text Only" link can be found at the top of this page. Go ahead, give it a try...

The text only version

Using the term "version" is a little misleading. There is only one version of this website. When you click "Text Only," the page is automatically refreshed and a less-formatted stylesheet is loaded. This is known as a Style Switcher. To get a better idea of what is happening, view the source before and after clicking "Text Only." The only change will be near the top of the page between the <style> tags.

If you don't have access to PHP but still want to use the "Text Only" link, there are many other options you can explore. If you do not want or need a text only version simply remove the link. If you have PHP and would like to make use of this feature, you can download the PHP Package within "NASA Templates"

Now it's time to Set Up Your Site.

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Building Your Site

NASA Fact

Insert a NASA fact here. Feel free to use a server side include or a back-end rotater.

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