Making Your Own Webpage: SMUG Workshop
Mary Lou West & Jeff Giacobbe, March 17, 2000
Montclair State University

Making a webpage requires several types of knowledge. You need to know what you want to say, what audience you are aiming at, how you want the layout to look, and how to tell the computer to do that for you. You also need a sense of style and good taste.

1. First, let's open the file we will use (the page source). Login to your account. (Under CSAM Lab #) The keystrokes are different on Alpha and on Pegasus, so skip to the section which is relevant to you.

Pegasus:

Alpha:

2. Now it's time to open Netscape by double clicking on its icon. (Usually found under CSAM Lab # ) Pull down Communicator, Composer. A blank page should appear.

If you have brought a file with you on a disk, put the disk into the computer now. We need to shrink the Netscape window a little, so click on the tiny box-within-a-box in the upper right corner of its window. Now you should be able to see your disk's icon, so open it by double clicking on it. Double click on the file you chose, and so open it (in Word, probably). Pull down Edit, Select All. Then pull down Edit, Copy.

Now click somewhere on the Netscape Composer blank page to bring it to the foreground. Pull down Edit, Paste.

For pegasus click on the Publish button in the menu bar. (It looks like a tiny rhombus with three little diagonal lines below it.) Fill in the boxes with

ftp://pegasus.montclair.edu/home/faculty/yourusername/public_html/index.html
yourusername
yourpassword

Click publish.

For alpha you need to copy and paste into the file index.html. You can't publish by the button because the path name changes. Save the file by typing (control key, z)

Go back to the Netscape Navigator page and type in for the URL http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~yourusername (or http://alpha.montclair.edu/~yourusername)

Cool! You have a webpage!

3. Go back to Netscape Composer and see if you can make your page look spiffier using the menu choices. Position the Netscape Navigator (browser) window so that you can see some of the editing window at the same time. Whenever you want to see what effect your editing changes have, save the file, then press Reload or Refresh in the browser window.

4. It's time to learn some basic hypertext markup language (html). This language consists of tags which are placed before and after the items you want acted on. First you turn on some functionality, then later you turn it off. The tags are always enclosed in these brackets < >, with the turn off tag having a slash in it </ >.

For a completely blank file you are typing from scratch yourself (without Netscape Composer) the first functionality you want to turn on is html itself, so edit the file whatever.html so that the very top line says <html>. Make some blank lines, then at the bottom of the file type </html>.

Now we have to give the page a title, so edit around your name to say <head> <title> Name's Page </title> </head>

The body of your file will contain the real content you wish to publish, so after the title line put <body> and then near the end of the file (but before the last line which turns off html) put </body>.

Now you can add some real content to your document. Go back up the file and after <body> type your first paragraph and save the file. Open a window for Netscape and position it so that you can see some of the editing window at the same time. Type your URL in the Netscape address box. Voila! Whenever you want to see what effect your changes have, save the file, then press Reload or Refresh in the browser window.

5. Usually this is not as pretty as you had hoped it would be. So, it's time to learn some more advanced html tags. Experiment with these in your document to see what they really do. Remember that most of them need to be turned off also. Some of the tags I have found to be useful are