Making Your Own Piece of Cyberspace: Web Page 101

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Making Your Own Piece of Cyberspace Web Page 101
3011 Geographies of Cyberspace

• Martin Dodge
• (m.dodge_at_ucl.ac.uk)
• Practical 1, Friday 8th October 2004
• http//www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/cyberspace

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Todays practical

• some background on the Web
• what is a web page like
• making a web page of your CV
• getting your web page on the Internet

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Where did the Web come from?

• the Web started life in 1989, but really took off
  in the mid 1990s with the release of free
  graphical browser software (Mosaic, then
  Netscape)
• Invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist
  working at CERN lab in Switzerland. idea of easy
  sharing of documents for scientists
• based on ideas of hypertext, distributed set of
  documents that are linked by hyperlinks.
  hypertext originated by Ted Nelson

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Web and the Internet

• Web is most common interface to the Internet, but
  they are not one and the same
• the Internet existed long before the Web
• the Web can not exist without the foundation of
  the Internet
• the Internet supports many other information
  sharing and communication services in addition to
  the Web, e.g. IRC, email, telnet, p2p
• the key Web standards (protocols to exchange
  data) are open and anyone can use them

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What do we know about the Web?

• no one really knows anything for sure!
• the Web is completely decentralised and freely
  growing and evolving.
• no one is in charge, you dont need permission to
  put a page up or create a link
• anything can be added or deleted at any time.
  deleting web pages, leaves no trace. lots of
  broken links!
• the Web is growing quickly, new services and
  technologies are being deployed all the time
• you dont need permission to put stuff on the Web

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How big is the Web?

• minimum of 4,285,199,774 pages (size of Google)
• maximum of 100 billion pages (database driven
  sites that generate dynamic pages on request)
• various ways to measure its characteristics
• number of web pages, sites, servers,users
• age of the web pages
• user behaviour (how long online, how many sites
  visited, how many clicks etc)
• most popular sites (audience ratings)
• search engines - coverage, currency, search terms
• number of registered domains (dot coms)

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Number of Web sites

• A web site is hard concept to define
• Netcrafts survey lthttp//www.netcraft.com/gt
• 54,407,216 web servers estimated Sept. 2004
  survey

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Size of some local sites?

• www.casa.ucl.ac.uk - 2,720 odd pages
• www.geog.ucl.ac.uk - 5,510 odd pages
• www.ucl.ca.uk - 310,000 odd pages
• www.ic.ac.uk - 127,000 odd pages
• (source estimates from Google)

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Most popular Web sites?
Nielsen//NetRatings, lthttp//www.nielsen-netrating
s.com/gt
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What is a web page?

• it is just a single file
• the file is text
• written in html (hypertext markup language)
• the file has the extension of .html / htm
• it is on a web server (usually a dedicated PC)
• the file contains content and markup code.
  You see the content on screen in the browser and
  the markup code tells the browser how to display
  the content (e.g. bold, italics, centred text etc
  etc)
• the html code can also link into other multimedia
  files such as pictures, animations, movies and
  sounds
• you also define hyperlinks to link to other web
  pages

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• lets look at the html code of a typical page,
  such as the homepage for the 3011 website

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Now work through the rest of the slides by
yourselfAsk for help if you get stuck!
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• have a go at viewing the source yourself
• open Netscape and load the cyberspace course page
  - www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/cyberspace
• on the Netscape menu bar, go to
• View -gt Page Source
• a new window will pop up with the html code for
  this page

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html code

• at first glance it looks complicated but it can
  be easily deciphered
• lttitlegt Geographies of Cyberspace lt/titlegt
• ltbgt text lt/bgt
• ltIgt text lt/Igt
• lta hrefpage2.htmlgtGo To Page 2 lt/agt
• generally you wont have to worry about the
  technicalities of the markup codes as
  applications like Dreamweaver handle this for you
• close the source window and Netscape

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Making a web page of your cv

• open your cv in Word
• start program called Dreamweaver
• Start -gt Internet Applications -gt Dreamweaver
  
• this is a powerful web authoring package

Watch out for the pop-up tool windows
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• you now want to copy and paste the text of your
  cv from Word into Dreamweaver
• In Word select all the text, Edit -gt Select All
• then Edit -gt Copy
• now switch to Dreamweaver and go Edit -gt Paste
• the result in Dreamweaver should look something
  like this (but with your cv obviously!)

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Getting started in Dreamweaver

• Dreamweaver is pretty powerful. It uses several
  pop-up menus with different functions
• well go through some of the common things you
  can do
• lets start with a bit of formatting of the text

Objects
Properties
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Centre text and make it bold
Select some text and then use the Align Center
and Bold buttons on the Properties pop-up. (you
get the idea Im sure)
Align center
BOLD
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• try some different property options
• for example text colour, font type, font size
• work through your whole cv, quickly setting the
  formatting you want
• now try some of the Objects functions
• embed different things into your web page
• some of the most useful ones are
• images
• tables
• rules

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Put in a horizontal bar
Properties of rules
Make a quick table
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• the second menu bar (Launcher) is not much use to
  you at this stage
• although you can use the first set of buttons to
  see the underlying html code of your page
• remember to switch back to Design View

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Page properties

• Modify -gt Page Properties
• set the page title and try experimenting with
  some different background and text colours if you
  want

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Getting your web page online

• once you are happy with the formatting of your cv
  it is time to get it live on the Web, so other
  Internet users can see it
• dont worry too much about final formatting, it
  is only really a test. also, you can change it
  all later
• you need to save your web page with a specific
  name and in a specific place on your r\ drive on
  WTS
• web pages must be saved in a html.pub directory
  on your WTS account

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• you need to make a html.pub directory now, at the
  top of the r\ drive, you can use Window Explorer

directory you need is R\html.pub
now in Dreamweaver save (File -gt Save) the cv
web page into the html.pub directory. Name the
file you save as index.htm
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Previewing your web page

• before putting your page on the Internet you can
  preview it in a web browser. This will give you a
  good idea how it will look to others
• In Dreamweaver go to
• File -gt Preview in Browser

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• the last stage is to run a small program that
  changes the file permissions of the index.htm
  file in your html.pub directory
• this means the UCL web server will see your
  files and then they are online, on the Web for
  all to see
• dont worry this is all handled automatically
• go to Start button -gt Programs -gt Internet
  Software -gt Publish Web Pages

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When you run the Publish Web Pages program a
login screen will pop up. type in your username
password
Your cv is now one of the billions of pages on
the World Wide Web! Now see if you can open
the new web page, start Netscape and the web
address of you cv will be http//www.homepages.ucl
.ac.uk/xxxxxxx/ (where xxxxxxx is your
username) (The squiggle is a tilde symbol)
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You should see something like this.WELL
DONE.(If not, please ask for help now!)
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Going a bit further - adding hyperlinks

• the next step is to add a hyperlink to create a
  virtual link between your page and other pages on
  the web
• hyperlinks are what gives the web its power and
  usefulness as you can weave information together
• lets try linking the postcode on your address to
  a map. so the reader of your cv web page can see
  where you live

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In Netscape, go to www.streetmap.co.uk and enter
your postcode
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You need to copy the web address of this page so
you can use it in your hyperlink. Right click on
the Use link and then Copy Link Location
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Now in Dreamweaver, highlight the postcode text
and right-click in the Link box, on the
properties pop-pop menu, and then Paste
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• the postcode text will now be coloured blue and
  underlined to show it is a hyperlink
• save the cv page again as index.htm in the
  html.pub directory. (say yes if you are asked
  to overwrite the existing file)
• run the Publish Web Pages program again
• (note, you need to run the Publish Web Pages
  program every time you save something new into
  the html.pub directory)
• now reload the cv web page again in Netscape and
  see if the hyperlink is working. Click on refresh
  to be sure youve loaded the latest. clicking on
  your postcode should open the Streetmap page
  showing the map

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Some design issues

• remember to spell check and proof read anything
  you put on the web
• just like the design of any document, remember to
  KISS
• not too much text as people dont like to read a
  lot on the web
• avoid annoying things like frames, flashing text
  and pop-up windows
• remember people like to print off web pages to
  read, so check your page prints well
• avoid horizontal scrolling

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Next steps

• email me the address of your web page so I can
  check it - m.dodge_at_ucl.ac.uk
• spend a bit of time exploring Dreamweaver
  functions and make some other test web pages to
  put online
• try adding hyperlinks between them
• Dreamweaver has various tutorials
• the next step will be putting images in your
  webpage. we cover this in the next practical

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More help - try netskillswww.ucl.ac.uk/is/trainin
g/netskills.htm(when you register, enter
University College Londonas your organisation)