• The instructions below should help with the general procedure of creating a web page. Additional help can be obtained from the course instructor, or from the lab assistants in Henry Hall.
1. Get a computer account on ‘claymore.engineer.gvsu.edu’ from Prof. Jack. This account will have a prototype web page that you can edit.
2. Go to a laboratory (HRY 113 or EC 616), or home computer and run ‘Netscape Gold’. Go to ‘claymore.engineer.gvsu.edu’ and look for your account under ‘students’. You should be able to find a page that starts with ‘YOUR_NAME_GOES_HERE’.
3. In Netscape (with your home page showing), select ‘edit’ from the tool bar, or under ‘file’ select ‘edit’ or ‘edit page’. You will be asked if you want to save the page. Create a ‘temp’ directory on the computer. This directory will be used to temporarily hold your web page files. Make sure that the files will be saved in the ‘temp’ directory, and then ‘save’ the files. An editor will start on the screen.
5. The editor behaves much like Microsoft Word, with some subtle differences. At this point add your name, and change your email address to your river account.
6. To upload the changes you have made to the website, under ‘file’ select ‘publish’. You will need to indicate the destination as ‘ftp://claymore.engineer.gvsu.edu/home/YOUR_NAME/public_html’. You will also need to enter your user name and your password (DO NOT SAVE THE PASSWORD - SOMEBODY ELSE CAN GET ACCESS TO YOUR ACCOUNT). You should see a message that indicates files are being uploaded successfully.
7. Use Netscape, not the editor, to see if the changes have occurred. Your changes may not show up on the browser. This is because Netscape does not reload pages every time to look at them. Pages are stored for up to 1 month, and reused when you look at them. There are two ways to update the screen before this time click on the reload button.
8. Next we will links to your home page. First, run Mathcad, and create a simple file, and then save it in the same folder/directory you saved. Use a file name that is all lower case such as ‘test.mcd’ - any upper case letters cause problems in Windows 95.
9. Get your home page back in the Netscape editor. Someplace type the word ‘GVSU’. Use the mouse to select what you just typed, and then click on the link button. For the link name enter ‘http://www.gvsu.edu’, and apply the change. This will now be a link to the Grand Valley home page. For your mathcad file type something like ‘Mathcad file’, highlight it, and add a link to ‘test.mcd’. This link will connect to your Mathcad file.
10. Publish the file, but this time click the option ‘include all files in folder’.
- Windows will not allow multiple applications to open the same file at the same time. If you seem to be having trouble opening a file, make sure it is not open in another application.
- As you add other files to your homepage, put them in the ‘temp’ directory. This will make all of the procedures simpler.
- Try to make your web pages small, and link them together. This will decrease download time and make browsers happier.
- Avoid using excessive images. Anything over 10K will make it very slow downloading over modem. Anything over 100K makes modem downloading painfully slow.
- When putting images on the web page use ‘jpg’ for photographic images, and ‘gif’ for line images. ‘jpg’ images can be compressed more than ‘gif’, but lines will become blurred.
- To link to other files or web pages there will be a ‘link’ command. If you want to add a file that is in your ‘temp’ directory, just put the name of the file in the ‘URL’ field.
- Watch upper/lower case. This is a major cause of web page problems.