Mac Word question--new webpage?

Question

When you open Word on our Mac Mini (which I love) it goes to the project menu, and there is an option to make a new webpage. From what I can tell, it acts like a document, but you can preview it and it looks like a webpage. Can you add buttons and things like that? And also, can you email a completed project as an attachment to someone else with the same program, allowing them to see the page?
Thanks!

Answer 1

Yes, it will make a web page and you can send it to friends as email attachment. They don't need MS Word to open the page. Any web browser will open a file with ending of ".html" or ".htm". Any images, video or sound files will not be part of "MySuperPage.html" but will be saved elsewhere such as in a folder called "MySuperPage_files" or similar name. That folder and the web page file must be kept together in some other folder (or on the desktop).

Any application that edits HTML code will allow you to make any type of web page imaginable with buttons and bows and everything. Bear in mind that to achieve some designs you may need to type the code by hand rather than use the menu options of an editor application. You can even save a web page from Safari or Firefox, open it with TextEdit and change the HTML code to anything you like. The result will be whatever you have the knowledge to build.

Now that I've answered your question with "Yes," let me add that I don't recommend using MS Word as a web page editor. It does not follow standards set down by the w3c organization and the result is too much wasted code. For some web pages you create, that may not seem a problem but with others it can result in slow loading of the page or unpredictable results. Use the W3C validation page to test your web page designs. It may not flag bloated code but it will flag errors that will give poor appearance.

I suggest NVU for web page editing as it seems to follow the standards very closely. You should still test any web page in several browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer on a Windows computer. Often the results with IE will be different from the other two as it also fails to follow several standards. Do not use Internet Explorer while connected to the Internet as it is notoriously poor at security (version 7 being much better than previous builds but still not safe).