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Our applications use templates to control much of the look and feel of the application. Templates are simply HTML files, or HTML fragments that the application uses for displaying the content. For instance, on the demo site at http://www.xcAuction.com/demo/Auction/xcAuction.asp, the main application template controls everything that appears along the top, left side, and very bottom of the page.
You can use Dreamweaver, FrontPage, or a similar application to create or edit the template files, but you may need to make some minor corrections to the HTML produced. For example, you should always use absolute references for images, which start with "/" or "http://", in your templates, rather than relative references, which start with a folder name, "../" (which refers to the parent folder), or sometimes "./" (which refers to the current folder) because if you use relative references, the template may look fine when viewed directly, but when served by the application, the images may not be properly referenced, and therefore, will not be found or displayed. If you use absolute references, the images will always be properly referenced and will therefore always display correctly.
Some HTML applications will often change around links to make them what they think they SHOULD be. As an example, some of the links in the main application templates contain macros like ~XUDURL~, which the application expands to whatever your gsXUDURL setting is. Some HTML editors will replace this with HTML encoding so ~XUDURL~ actually becomes part of the URL, breaking all of those links, so you should be careful that this does not happen
You can alter any .htm files, but you cannot alter the .asp files. The HTML and ASP pages often occur together in pairs. For instance, the page XUDAboutUs.asp should not be edited, but most of the content on that page is controlled by the default template and the XUDAboutUs.htm template, which are in the XUDHtmlTxt folder. By editing these two files, you can customize the look of the About Us page considerably.
The XUDAboutUs.htm template is an example of an HTML fragment, which means it is not a full HTML file with HEAD and BODY tags. In fact, it should only contain the HTML that is between the and tags of a full HTML document, and do not include the and tags themselves. You can probably switch to an "HTML View" of your file once you have designed it in Dreamweaver, and so you should only copy the HTML between those tags into the XUDAboutUs.htm template. In fact, except for the main application templates, all other HTML templates are fragments and should only contain the HTML that exists between the and tags.
You will also need to make sure your HTML editor does not mangle any links in your templates. Often, editors will rewrite links to point to the locations they think the links should point to. However, since the templates are served by the application, and not the web server, very often, links will appear to point to the wrong locations when the template is viewed directly, but when served by the application, they will be correct.
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