Creating Your Webpage

I will guarantee you that if you follow my directions step by step, you will have a webpage that you will be proud of in no time! Because I start from the beginning, a fancy webpage can be yours even if you have only a rudimentary level of knowledge of the computer and the internet. As stated on my homepage, these directions are primarily for the MTSU student who has an internet frank account, however, I think others will also find it useful. My first suggestion is that you download this page and print it out.

Steps to Creating Your Webpage:

• At the frank prompt type the following: homepage
  (What this does is create a directory called "public_html". In this directory you will automatically have a file called "index.html", this is what you create your homepage on.)

• At the frank prompt, type: cd public_html.
  (What this does is get you into this directory. You can see the files this directory contains by typing ls. At this point you will only see the file index.html)

• At the frank prompt, type: chmod 755 public_html

• At the frank prompt, type: pico index.html
  (Now you can edit your homepage! As you will see, your document will have the following tags in the following order:(html),(head),(title),(/title),(/head),(body),(/body), (/html). (These are the necessary barebones tags.)

• If you want to create a homepage different from the one automatically given, just delete all but the tags while you are in pico.

• Do you want pictures on your page, such as the turning earth on my homepage? Here's how you get it: Put your arrow on the earth and click the right button on your mouse. Now save it as,say, c:\earth.gif. Now go back to your frank prompt and type: receive earth.gif, then Alt x and at this prompt type: send c:\earth.gif. ; When it is done, just type c and enter, then type exit to get back to the prompt.

• Let's do a basic page to get an idea of how this all works:

  The tags will be enclosed by parenthesis instead of the "less than" and "greater than" arrows, but when you type them in be *SURE* to use those arrows! I've used parenthesis in place of arrows so the computer wouldn't read the tags.
  Edit as follows:
  (html)
  (head)
  (title) "your name"'s homepage (/title) (/head)
  (h2)(b)(center) "your name"'s Homepage (/center)(/b)(/h2)(br) (body)
  (img align=left src="earth.gif")(p) Welcome to my homepage! type whatever you want here...make it as long as you want, but when you want a new paragraph, remember to type (p)
  (/BODY)
  (/HTML)
  

• Now exit and save
  
• At the frank prompt, type: chmod 755 index.html earth.gif
  What this does is make it possible for others to see your homepage and the picture of the earth. You will need to do this for *every* page and picture that you create or upload. Remember to change your file to DOS text before uploading it to your account.

• Go to your web browser to see how your page looks...if you don't have a web browser, just type : lynx http://www.mtsu.edu/~your address, to view your page. If you have to go through lynx, you won't see any of your pictures.

• To feel comfortable with web page creation, you really need to just play around with it at this point. Feel free to email me with any questions. The following are some basic tags and pointers that you need to be aware of. As before, remember that the parenthesis stand for arrow signs!

  Tags:

  
  
  1. (H1) up to (H6)
     This gives you the fontsize, with h1 being the largest. I use (H2)(fontsize=+2) for my titles and don't put any value for the text because default is the size I want.
     
  2. (a href="filename") Words you want to be to be clickable to the filename you put in the a href tag (/A)
     
  3. (img src="filename of gif")
     This is going to put a picture on your page. You can tell *where* to put it by typing the following: (img align=center src="filename of gif")
     
  4. (b) :This makes your words bold (/b)
     
  5. (i) : This makes your words italisized (/i)
     
  6. (ul)
     (LI) A
     (LI)B
     (/ul)
     This will give you an unnumbered list
     If you want a number list, change the (ul) to (ol)
     
  7. (em) : Emphasis (/em)
     
  8. (u): Underline (/u)
  9. The following will make a a 1x1 table that will have a clickable button. Of course, you will have to get a button gif and chmod it to do this. (table border=1)(tr)(td)(a href="econ.html")(img align=left src="buttonbl.gif" ALT="click here: ")(/A)(/td)(/tr)(/table)
     You can make additional rows and columns by adding (tr)(td) name (/td)(/tr) before the tag (/table)
  • As you can see, it is *ALWAYS* necessary to close your tags! For example, if you have (b), you need to close it with (/b). If this isn't done, the rest of your document will be in bold!

  • Closing the tags *MUST* be done in backward order in which they were opened. Here's an example:
    (h2)(b)(center)must be closed as(/center)(/b)(/h2).

  • Before you start editing pages or uploading pages or pictures, make sure you are in the public_html directory first!

  • Save your work to a floppy

  • You can create all your pages in pico, but you will find this kind of slow, so you will probably want to buy an html editer or use your word processor. (I personally find using wordperfect to be sufficient.) After you've created a page in, say, wordperfect, and saved it asa DOS text, just get to your frank prompt, cd to public_html, then type kermit and receive it as I told you how in the directions above. Once again, make it public by typing chmod 755 filename. If you want to connect this to another page, such as your homepage, do the following: pico index.html; get to the point before the word you want it connected to and type (a href="file you just uploaded")word or words that are clickable(/a)

  • Tags are not case-sensitive, i.e. it doesn't matter whether they are written in capital letters or in lower-case.

  • To insure that all files in the public directory are given to the correct permission level go to root directory, (just type cd to do this), and type the following: chmod 644 public_html/*.*

  • It is also a good idea to create a directory within your public directory for your graphic files. To do this, cd to your public_html directory, then type the following at the prompt:mkdir IMAGES. When uploading graphics, make sure you've cd'ed to this directory! Also, make sure it is put in your tag, by this I mean:(img src="./IMAGES/earth.gif")

  • Good Luck! Let me know if you have any luck, and if so, give me your address so I can check it out!

  Click on the icon to return to my homepage.