Publishing Your Pages
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 you with a URL, or Internet address, that can be used by others to see the information available on your web site.
Free 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!
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.
QUIA (http://www.quia.com)
QUIA stands for Quintessential Instructional Archive, and provides a vast
variety of services. QUIA offers neat activities that the educator can
build in a few short steps. Your games can include hangman, matching, jumbled
words or an Internet scavenger hunt. The templates are useful, easy to
use, and provide you with step-by-step guidance. Another option with the
use of QUIA is to build class Web pages where you can post information
about yourself, your school, or class and homework assignments or announcements.
You can link to any activities that you have built with QUIA from your
class home page. The registration is free, the Web pages are hosted on
the QUIA server, and it is easy to complete. QUIA does offer Premium Service,
which provides Ad-Free Web pages for a fee, based upon class or school
size.
Scholastic (http://homepage.scholastic.com/classpages/start_hp.cfm)
Scholastic, well known for children's books, teacher journals and curriculum
support, has moved to the world of the Web. With their class home page
builder, educators have the opportunity to build nice class Web pages.
Upon free registration, you can include information for parents and students,
photographs of classroom activities, and educational links appropriate
for topics of study. You will also find a section titled "Editor's
Picks," which provides links to various books and characters that
are a portion of the Scholastic collection. A nice feature
of the Scholastic home page builder is that you can make your page private.
Students must know the classroom user name and password to gain access
to your pages.
MySchoolOnline.Com (http://myschoolonline.com/golocal)
Part of the "Learning Network," My School Online bills itself
as the "Web's largest community of local education sites." The
site offers free hosting in a template style, with ready to
use website building tools (therefore limiting you from using tools like
Dreamweaver to build your own customized pages, however). Upon registration,
you can build a class website, create and maintain an electronic grade
book, or sign up for professional development. As with many of the free
Web hosting sites, advertising banners are located on the pages built
by educators.
TeacherWeb (http://www.teacherWeb.com)
This is a nice site that provides a good opportunity for school-to-home
communication. You can customize your pages to include announcements,
homework, links, frequently asked questions, a calendar, and teacher
information. When completed, the students are presented a clean looking
page with links for each option available to them. Content updates are
secure and easy, and your students and parents will receive instant information.
Educators who use this site will find it a good place to communicate
with students and parents.
HighWired (http://www.highwired.com/HomePage/)
The HighWired Network offers free Web hosting for a wide variety of educators.
With this site, other school support services can participate online
too: the school nurse can post office hours or the cafeteria manager
can publish the lunch menu, for example. The HighWired Network is a bit
more customizable than some free Web hosting programs, and you have the
opportunity to upload photographs to your pages or create an online newspaper
for your school. The pages are stored on the HighWired server, and you
can put your school name or initials in the actual address to make it
a bit more representative of your school.
Paid Commercial Services
Geocities, QUIA, Tripod, Angelfire, and many other free sites also offer premium fee-based services. The perks of paying usually involve more storage space, better upload and site management options, no banner or popup advertisements, and sometimes your own domain name (like www.Lauraswebpage.com or www.MrSmithsclass.com).
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.
Some things to remember when making web pages:
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
"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.
Publishing through Dreamweaver
You can use information from your own server to upload files directly from Dreamweaver easily and quickly. If you have not yet defined your site, review the Managing Your Sites section for help.
1. If you don't already have it open, open the Files Window by choosing it from the Window menu.
2. Your files inside your site will be listed for you. You can select all of them or simply click on one at a time to select files, then click the blue "up" arrow to Put files on the remote site. Whether it is WebDAV, FTP, or some other remote type of site, as long as you can connect to it, Dreamweaver will take care of the rest.
3. The Files window will also allow you to see what currently resides on the Remote site by clicking the right-hand popup menu and choosing the appropriate view. Most people will typically just use the Local view (their disk or computer hard drive location) and Remote View (the server location). In the Remote view, you can click on a file in the list to select it then click the green "down" arrow to download a file from the server to your local location.
