Before getting down to business on writing lots of HTML, you will probably want to prepare all (or most) of the images that you will need. Inside the new web folder you created in the previous lesson, now make a subfolder which will contain only your image files and graphics. Technically, this isn't a requirement but it is definitely a good design practice.

Most designers will name this folder "images" but a few will use "graphics" instead. You can call it whatever you want, but make the name easy to remember. Now copy all of the graphic images which you intend to publish into this folder. Note that distinction: Many image creation tools have a "master" format that is not the same as what is ultimately published on the web. Basically all of the images you publish should be of type JPEG (.jpg file extension), GIF (.gif), or PNG (.png). Some browsers may support other types like TIFF, BMP, or TGA, but many browsers will not. Stick with the most popular three (JPEG, GIF, and PNG) and you won't go wrong.

If you have high-resolution master images that you wish to keep, but you are publishing low-resolution versions so that they will be smaller and faster to download and view, do not put the masters into your images directory. Keep them elsewhere on your hard drive, because when the site is completed you will be doing a bulk-copy of everything in the web and image folder up to the ISP's web server.

By the way, this is a good time to introduce an important design tip: Use lower-case for all of the file and directory names in your web site!

Your PC may not care about upper and lower case filenames, so a folder called "images" may be indistinguishable from "Images" or "iMaGeS". But many (most?) web servers on the Internet, and probably the one at your ISP, do indeed care about upper and lower case. Just get in the habit of using all lower case everywhere, and your life will be much simpler.

By the way, for basically the same reason you should never use spaces or weird characters (like ampersands or commas) in your file or directory names. They are difficult for people to type correctly if they want to use the "address" line in their browser to go directly to your pages, and they may cause trouble on some web servers. Just avoid them, and you won't go wrong. Dashes and underscores are almost universally safe, though.

Now you have a web folder with a name of your choice, which will contain your HTML files, and you have an images folder inside it to contain your icons, textures, and other graphics. You're ready to get started with the HTML itself, so let's move on and learn a few useful tags!