Technology Help and Tutorials

In order to publish a web page, you must have a web-hosting service of some kind that will use its servers to share your files over the Internet. The hosting service will provide the student with a URL, or Internet address, that must be shared with the instructor for grading.

New for Fall 2004 is the ability to publish pages on the School of Education webserver from home! All EDCI 260 students will be given accounts for this server to publish their webquest and other web projects. See below for more details.

School of Education (http://literacy.purduecal.edu/student/studentname):
The School of Education is happy to host web files for students enrolled in the undergraduate education program. Contact your instructor to obtain an account on this system.

Using the School of Education server is free of cost and provides a great deal of flexibility in how you design your website, more so than any of the other hosting services. To publish your pages here, you may be on either computing platform (Windows or Macintosh) and you can publish from home or from on-campus. Your instructor will give you more details on the login process when you obtain an account. See Logging into the Webfolder with Mac OS X or FTP Webfolder Access for Windows Users for help in accessing the server.

SPECIAL NOTE: You may also access video tutorials to see the process of publication step by step at
- http://education.purduecal.edu/tutorials/ftpprograms.htm (for those using an FTP program)
- http://education.purduecal.edu/tutorials/ftpwithexplorer.htm (for those using Internet Explorer)
Purdue Calumet supports Adobe Dreamweaver as the program of choice for creating web pages on the Education server. However, you may also create files in Microsoft FrontPage or another web editor and upload them to the server using FTP on or off-campus, or Apple File Services on campus.

Other Services (Commercial, non-Purdue services)

Yahoo! GeoCities (http://www.geocities.com):
GeoCities has a variety of hosting services available, including fee-based and free websites. Storage and terms and conditions are slightly more stringent with a free site, but GeoCities is reasonably reliable for small websites.

Like other hosting services, GeoCities offers a page-building tool that allows you to create web pages without the use of FrontPage or other web editing software. For creating simple pages, the page-builder is acceptable, but it highly recommended that you use FrontPage, Netscape Composer, or Dreamweaver as they offer a great deal more flexibility.

The major disadvantage of GeoCities is that it does not allow for direct publishing via Microsoft FrontPage unless you have purchased a "pro" site. This forces other users GeoCities' built-in EZ-Upload tool in order to upload pages and graphics files individually. Remember to upload ALL the files associated with your page!

To see a video tutorial of Geocities in action, visit http://education.purduecal.edu/tutorials/geocitiesdemo.htm

Lycos Tripod (http://www.tripod.com) and Lycos Angelfire (http://angelfire.lycos.com ):
Both Angelfire and Tripod are hosted by the same parent company, and both are reliable services offering free and fee-based website hosting. Like GeoCities, there are more policy and storage space limits applied to free sites, but both Tripod and Angelfire are excellent places to host small websites.

Just like GeoCities, these sites offer simple page-building tools that are not as flexible as a real page editor. Once again, it is strongly recommended that you use a real web editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver to complete your assignments.

The greatest benefit of a Tripod or Angelfire website is that both support direct publishing from Microsoft FrontPage. This allows FrontPage to upload all the files associated with your pages straight to the server, without the risk of losing graphics files and breaking your links. For this reason, if you wish to use FrontPage to create your pages, then it is highly recommended that you choose a Tripod or Angelfire account instead of GeoCities. Visit http://www.tripod.lycos.com/guides/frontpage.html (Tripod users) or http://angelfire.lycos.com/doc/general/fpfaq.html (Angelfire users) for more information on how to publish pages from the FrontPage program to your account.

America Online (http://members.aol.com), Comcast (http://www.comcast.com), and other services:
Available if you are an America Online or Comcast Cable Internet subscriber. Many other Internet Service Providers offer web server space for free or for an additional fee, also -- contact your provider to find out the rules and accessibility requirements.

Because you are already paying for these providers' services, there are (usually) no required banner ads or traffic limitations on your page pages. However, like the others, you will have a limited amount of storage space, and FTP or FrontPage publishing procedures will be different depending on your provider.

When uploading your pages to any of the hosting services, ensure that all of your graphics files, audio files, and/or video files also get uploaded. It cannot be stressed enough how important this is! If you do not upload every file associated with your pages, they will not "work" on the Web. This is because, unlike a Word document, pictures, movies, and other files are not embedded into the page. Each file still exists as a separate entity that must accompany your web page wherever it goes if you expect it to appear in a web browser. The only elements of an HTML page that are actually part of the page are text, links, and tables.

If you take clipart or other graphics from other people's websites, be very careful that you are not violating copyright laws. Many websites state specifically when images are copyrighted, and while some do not allow you to use their images at all, others will only so long as you state in your web page where you acquired the file. Additionally, there are many websites that offer collections of royalty-free clipart, which are free for you to download and use in your personal web pages. Try Clipart Connection or Clipart.com for starters, or search for "free clipart" or "free graphics" in any search engine.

To download a graphic you like from a web page, simply right-click (Windows) or control-click (Macintosh) on the image you wish to download, and choose to save the image file to your web folder. Once you have the file saved, you may insert it into your web pages using your web page editor.