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| About Web Pages and the Web: |
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Web pages and course web sites are fast replacing traditional handouts as a way for instructors to distribute information to their students. Creating and updating course web pages is easy to do and allows instructors to keep course information for their students current. There are a few differences between web pages and traditional handouts and understanding these differences from the beginning will help you make the best use of your time and the tools available.
Two of the main differences are:
- The layout of a web page is not fixed. Unlike handouts, where line breaks and what typeface is used to display it are fixed, the end viewer of a web page controls a lot of how a page looks. Keeping this in mind and taking a more flexible approach to designing pages will save you time and aggravation in the end.
- Information on web pages is dynamic. Because web pages can easily be updated as often as needed, it is very important that they include information about when they were last changed. It is a good idea to have contact information and the date the page was last updated at the bottom of every page. It is also important to let students know when information has been updated.
| About Putting Web Pages Online at Rice: |
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In order for others to be able to see the web pages you create, the web pages must be located on a computer that runs a program called a "web server" and the computer must have a way of knowing that you want others to see the web pages. At Rice, the two main places users can put web pages to be viewed by others is on Owlnet (the main student computing network) and the RUF (the main faculty and research computing network). Departments and other organizations at Rice may have their own computers where you can put files to be viewed on the web.
On Owlnet or RUF, the way that the computer knows you have pages you want others to see on the web is by you placing them in a directory called public_html in your home directory. One of the best places to put web pages for a course is in an Owlnet course account. Contact CTS or a divisional computing consultant for help in creating an account for your course.
There are different ways of working on web pages, but the easiest way is for you to have a "working" set of files located on your computer that you can change whenever you want and an "official" set of files that the students see. Once you have made changes to your local computer and you are ready for students to view them, you move those pages over to the course Owlnet or RUF account and put them in the public_html directory. This may sound complicated, but Dreamweaver (the web site editor we'll be using for this tutorial), makes this very easy to do. The most important thing for you to remember is that all of the files that are associated with your course web pages (web pages and image files mostly) must be located in a single folder or directory on your computer.
The Site window in Dreamweaver makes it easy to keep track of the files on your local computer and on the "official" pages on Owlnet. In the image below of the Site window, the local files are shown on the right side and the "offiicial" or remote files are shown on the left.
Classroom
Technology Services (cts@rice.edu)
