IT Resources - Web Construction (Faculty Web Page How-to)

Faculty Web Pages and Web Sites

Overview

File Storage
All Oakton employees have space on network server "servercc" where they can easily post web pages. All web pages saved to the employee's H: drive (while on campus) in the public.www subfolder are available to the world. Any employee can also access his folder from off-campus to upload, download and do updates via FTP (File Transfer Protocol). For more information on FTP, go to http://www.oakton.edu/resource/it/ftp/.

Location
The URL for files saved to H:/public.www/ is http://www.oakton.edu/~username/filename.htm. If you have a home page that you have named "index.htm," and someone types only http://servercc.oakton.edu/~username, the index.htm page will appear as the default. If you do not have a page called index.htm, a list of all the files in your public.www folder will appear in the browser.

What to post
Home sites can range from a page or two to dozens. Many instructors are posting their syllabi and other class materials to their public folders so students have easy access from anywhere. They may also have pages of valuable class links or pages of a more personal nature. Anything not in violation of copyright, Board Policy for Acceptable Use or the College Web Standards is OK.

For those posting their first web page to their public folder, even if it's just a simple converted syllabus, it is advisable ot also create a personal home page. This home page should be called "index.htm" (or "index.html") and can link to any other documents you have.

Creating Web Pages
It's not necessary to know HTML, the main language of the web, in order to create web pages. Dreamweaver is a highly dynamic yet new user-friendly authoring program that is available on campus. Simple, free programs like Seamonkey/Netscape Composer can be used just like a word processor and can be downloaded to your home computer. Microsoft Word can convert existing Word documents to HTML. Word and other programs can convert different types of documents to PDF (Portable Document Format, the Acrobat format). Instructions for these and others are available from the Web Construction Basics page.

Web Accessibility
You must also consider web accessibility for people with disabilities. Making pages accessible is not that difficult but there are certain steps to follow. IT provides an accessibility Overview and guidelines on the Web Construction Basics page.

Faculty Templates
To create home pages and syllabi, link to the following materials:

Faculty Home Page Template - Sample	This template has all the elements necessary to meet the college web standards. Open this up in any web authoring program and modify it with personal information then save it to H:/public.www as "index.htm."
Faculty Home Page Template - Explanation	Breaks out the elements of the home page template and explains what everything is for and why everything is there.
Faculty Web Site Flow Chart	Shows how your multiple web pages link together. Helps visualize how the home page works in conjuntion with your syllabi and other materials.