Thank you all for the information! From the testing I've done over the past few days this is where I'm stuck. When trying to use certain Javascript inside the template file it seems to be selective or possibly even restricted from particular things.
As mentioned previously I've been doing as much reading on this forum as possible to see if any past efforts were of any help, added with the info provided by you gentlemen.
Essentially what you were saying is that if I want to keep things very simple and not add any extra pages to the server I just need to alter the ".tpl" file? It appears as though I'm
not the only user who has asked similar questions, thankfully I found at least one fairly recent thread that allowed me to do some troubleshooting.
Specifically "bmartino1" instructing another poster on adding the Javascript in for a
Paypal icon. While I've had plenty of experience pasting their code into other websites I decided to give it a try on my HFS server even though I won't be using it, just to test out and see if the code would show up in the "view source" option. What I found is that when I paste that particular code into my ".tpl" file
it works just as it should and it also
does show up in the view source code. Now I'm just a little confused on why that works fine, but yet if I test with any other Javascript, or even simply using div tags and floating images around, then that code does
not show up in the source hence leading me to believe that it's either being put in the wrong place, or additional code needs to be added or removed.
Another helpful resource from that thread was reading about pasting in Javascript code for ad publishing; which again like the Paypal icon button I do not need it. BUT the useful tool I remembered from my past experiences with ad publishing sites they use a "troubleshooter" option to test that your code has been placed in the correct spot within your website. I tried this with 2 separate ad sites and not only could they
not detect the code, but just like my previous Javascript entries into the template file they still didn't show within the "view source" option.
At this point I just don't understand how the Paypal code can be pasted into my template file, shows up on the website, and in the source code; but yet these other things
won't show in the source?? The only thing this leads me to conclude is that there must be some alternative way, or extra bit of something that needs to be added to the Javascript in order to make it show up in the source (and function properly of course
)
Is it pretty common for HFS users to make an "index.html" for their sites? If this is what I'll need to do in order to get the designs I want, and start creating templates to share then I suppose I would just need the best step-by-step guide in doing that because the threads I've read here on that topic aren't very clear to me unless I missed one.
Of course I would prefer to figure out exactly why the different scripts inside my code inside my code aren't working or showing up in