Creating Web Sites for Courses

A Course Web Site

Creating a web site for your course can be much more than just a tool for persuading your students you're technologically "with it". Web sites have several strengths that play well to particular pedagogic goals. If you focus your site on exploiting these strengths you'll find a simple web site can enhance communications with your students.

How do I go about creating a course web site?

There are a lot of details involved in setting up a web page. This help sheet outlines the general steps so that you will have a sense of what's involved. You'll want to talk to your computing coordinator before embarking on a major web project.

1. Arrange a home for your web site

The first step to putting up a web site is to get some space on a web server where your pages will live. The simplest way to do this is to contact your computing coordinator. They'll be able to provide you with the best current options and will have the most up-to-date information about web pages in general.

2. Get a tool for making your page

Next you'll need a web editing tool for creating your web page. Dreamweaver is one such tool, Claris HomePage another. If you already have one of these tools on your office computer, then you're set. If not, you'll want to contact your computing coordinator and arrange to get a copy of an appropriate tool. The files that these programs create are all in a common format: hypertext markup language (html). No matter which program you use, your pages will be viewable by everyone.

3. Write your pages

This is pretty much as simple as firing up your web editing tool and typing away. The editor will start up with a blank document and you can type in it just like a word processor. When you're done save the file to an appropriate place on your hard drive (you'll likely want to create a new folder to hold web page related files.)

4. Okay, so it's not quite that simple

There are a number of ways in which writing a web page isn't exactly like working with your favorite word processing program. Generally speaking, you have less flexibility when working with web pages than with a word processor. If you're aware of these limitations before you start things should go smoothly.

When you save your web pages you'll need to follow several rules about names. All web page files must have names ending in .html or .htm. Additionally you should avoid the use of non-alphanumeric characters in files names. It's especially important to avoid spaces in file names. Also it simplifies things immensely if you keep all file names lower case. mypage.html is a fine web page name. My Page! is not. The main page for your web site should be named index.html.

Web pages lack any intrinsic notion of page size or margins. Controlling exactly how text is arranged on the page, while simple in a word processing program, is very difficult on a web page. If you keep your page very simple, this won't be a problem. If you want a more complex arrangement you'll need to be ready to spend some significant time mastering the often arcane techniques used to create fancier web pages.

Keep in mind that your web pages won't look exactly as they appear in your web editor. It's good practice to preview your web pages in Netscape (just select FileÉOpen Page in Navigator and point it at the html document you've saved on your hard drive) to get a feel for exactly what it will look like when it's viewed through the web.

5. What about pictures and links?

You'll almost always want to put a link or two (or ten) within your web page to connect it to other pages. At the very least, a link to a main departmental page is appropriate so that your web page isn't a dead end for people arriving there directly. The process is simple. Simply highlight the text in your page that you want to act as the link (the place a reader will 'click' on) and then type the address (e.g. http://yahoo.com) of the destination of the link in the appropriate place. In Dreamweaver you'd put the address in the "link" box of the Properties window.

If you've created several pages for your web site you can link between them the same way--just use the name of the file (e.g. 2ndpage.html) rather than a full web address in the link box.

If you have existing image files in either jpeg or gif format you can add them into your web page by moving them into the same folder as the html files and then using the Insert Image option in your web editor. Often if the images haven't been specifically created and sized for the web they won't look right. If this is the case you'll either need to devote some time to learning how to create images for the web or omit the image.

6. Can I do this all with Word?

Microsoft Word and many other programs offer a "save as a web page" or "save as html" feature which offers the tantalizing possibility that you could write web pages in a familiar word processing program and then just save them to the web, without the need for a separate web editing tool. Sadly, the results are often disappointing. Web pages created with this feature often have odd formatting the is very resistant to correction even using a normal web editing tool. And once a document has been translated to web form, editing it in a word processor will usually result in a confusing mess.

Certainly, if you have a simple document already in Word, using the "Save as a web page" feature is worth a try -- it only takes a few seconds. But if the result viewed in Netscape isn't what you wanted, it's almost never worth trying to "fix" the result. If you just want to move existing text from a word processing file to the web, it's usually more efficient to copy the text out and paste it into a real web editing tool.

7. Move 'em to the web

When you've got your page (or pages) ready simply copy them over to your course WebPub folder on COLLAB (What's that?). Be sure to copy any image files as well or the images won't show once there they'll be live on the web.

Where can I get further information?

Your coordinator is always a good source of up-to-date information especially about the particulars of web technology at Carleton.

For more information about web publishing, including personal web pages and restricting access to web pages, see http://www.carleton.edu/campus/ITS/training/webpub/

ITS offers regular classes on a variety of relevant topics. Check the Training section of the ITS web pages for current offerings.

This document hasn't touched on the design issues relevant to web sites. There is an excellent reference for this information here: http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/