Before using web page editors like Dreamweaver or FrontPage, I strongly recommend creating a home page using nothing more than a text editor. This way, you will understand what HTML is, where the files need to be, and how to fix things that are sometimes hard to fix with web page editors. This example is done on a PC, but the process is similar on a Macintosh.
First, create a folder called public_html on your computer. It might look like this:
Now use a text editor to create a text file called index.html and save it in the public_html folder. The folders will look like this:
On a PC, you might want to use Notepad or Wordpad to create the file index.html. Be careful not to save the file in rich text format, and certainly not as a Word document. (Word documents have many additional characters besides the actual text that you type.) You can download PSPad, a text editor which colors HTML tags so they are easier to read. On a Macintosh, you could try SimpleText. I am told that, to find it in the Scientific Computing Lab, you can Press APPLE + F Search for "Simpletext" (one word). Other editors on the Macintosh may not let you edit the html code directly. (I have not tried SimpleText yet.)
Here is a snapshot of the Notepad window where I am making a simple homepage:
The text above would be a good start for your home page, so type it in and save it as index.html. While you are typing it, you'll figure out what the HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) tags mean. You can preview the web page by double clicking the file in the public_html folder:
This will normally launch a web browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc. On my machine, I see:
That's pretty dull, but it won't take long to fix it up a bit. First, the image file picture.jpg is not being displayed in the browser window. That's because the browser looks in the folder public_html but doesn't find a file called picture.jpg. Add a file called picture.jpg to the folder public_html. You might want to use a picture of yourself, or make something with Photoshop or Paint. I used Paint. Make sure to NOT use spaces in the filename, and it's best to use all lowercase letters. Now the folder looks like this:
and after refreshing the view of the web page in the browser, it looks like this:
You can now add more links, organize the page into subsections using <h2>New section name</h2> and pictures. There is no need to do anything complicated right now.
You can read about HTML online. Here is one good tutorial site, where you will find the quote "You can easily edit HTML files using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, instead of writing your markup tags in a plain text file. However, if you want to be a skillful Web developer, we strongly recommend that you use a plain text editor to learn your primer HTML."
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Department of Mathematics and Statistics /
Math 592 /
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