Main Content:
Web Publishing Hints
NOTE: At the time this information was published, Netscape Composer was widely used as an authoring tool for web sites on campus. We now strongly recommend using Dreamweaver for authoring sites. Dreamweaver automatically takes care of a lot of the site management issues and problems mentioned here.
Name your "home" page index.html
When creating a new site, the default page that displays (i.e.,
your home page) when people visit your site should be named
"index.html" (or index.htm, if your prefer). If a file called
"index.html" or "index.htm" is not found by the web server in
your site directory (when the referring URL ends in a "/" -
and not with a file name), then the person browsing to your
site is presented with a list of all the files within your site,
of which there may be many to choose from (including those which
you don't necessarily want exposed outside of their intended
content - for example, frames).
Microsoft Word "save as html"
AVOID using Microsoft Word save as html for authoring your web
pages. Microsoft html pages are extremely code heavy and contain
a lot of extraneous characters in the code. This makes for abnormally
large files, sometimes four times larger than they would be
with an editor such as Dreamweaver, and consequently this results
in slow download times for end users. You can still use Microsoft
Word to save as html, but then you should use the "Clean
up Word html" feature in Dreamweaver before publishing
the html page(s).
Images
AVOID resizing images from their original size which were taken
with a digital camera . Not only does the image have the original
file size, meaning it takes up more disk space which results
in slow downloads, but resized images can play funny tricks
with browsers. The browser has to extrapulate data in order
to resize the image for display. Some browsers on some platforms
will just not display the image at all. The best is to take
the original image into a photo editing software and resize
it. Then re-save it in a web format, with an extension such
as jpg (pronounced: j-peg).
Publishing to a directory
When using Netscape Composer, your publishing ftp URL MUST ALWAYS
have a prefix that starts ftp://webhotel.roch.edu/adminusers/userid
where userid would be replaced with your actual userid. After
the userid portion of the URL, be sure to include the site directory
you are publishing to (for example, publichhtml for your default
site). User "jdoe" would NOT want to publish to ftp://webhotel.roch.edu/adminusers/jdoe/
but instead ftp://webhotel.roch.edu/adminusers/jdoe/anothersite.
Publishing Errors in Netscape Composer
You may get errors when trying to publish using Netscape Composer.
Check to see if you have all the publishing preferences set
correctly and spelled correctly. Make sure you have saved the
file you are trying to publish. You can't create something from
nothing. The file doesn't exist in Composer's mind until you've
saved it. On the Mac you may have to use an FTP client such
as Fetch to upload your files.
Naming of files
Only use alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9), periods, dashes
and underscores when naming your web files to publish. Special
characters (like spaces, !, @, #, $, %, &, *) are not allowed
and as a result, your links may break.
Choose a system (that works) and stick with it. Save yourself some headaches and be consistant when naming your files. It would probably be best if you use all lower case when naming; that way if you update a page or are making a link, you know what your system is, and your links will work. Keep in mind that some servers including our own are case sensitive, meaning capitalization and lower case letters do make a difference.
File extensions
Be Sure to include file extensions. The web server determines
your file "type" by its extension, and then takes the appropriate
action for files of that type when delivering it to web browsers.
File extensions are the characters after the last period in
a file name. For example, index.html has an extension of "html"
and picture.gif has an extension of "gif." Your published files
should have the correct extensions for their types. It is best
to use consistency when giving extensions. If you are naming
HTML files pick EITHER .htm or .html for ALL the pages in your
site. If you mix in .htm with .html, you will end up with multiple
copies of the same page if you re-save a web page and give it
a different extension than the original (ex. if your updated
home page is index.htm it will not overwrite an older version
index.html, thus the changes will not be seen on the web).
Multimedia files
Publishing multimedia files to the academic site is okay. BUT
the server is not configured to handle large streaming multimedia
files, so the end result may be a frustratingly slow experience
for people who are browsing to your site. Keep in mind that
our Internet connection at the college is very fast compared
to what the average home user (student) would have. Just because
you can put multimedia files on a web page doesn't mean it is
good web design. We have plans to implement streaming multimedia
servers that you can similarly publish to in the future.
Connecting to Webhotel
WebHotel only accepts network connections from UCR's network
(including UCR's Remote Access Service). If you are trying to
publish while connected to the Internet via a commercial ISP
(Internet Service Provider) such as AOL (America Online), the
FTP connection will be refused.
Passwords
Your authentication credentials (i.e., userid and password)
for web publishing are the same as your credentials for logging
into UCR's Intranet and dialing into UCR's Remote Access Services
(except that Remote Access uses your e-mail address as a userid).
Changing your password via the profile page on the UCR Intranet
server changes your password for all of these serivces.
Also see the Frequently Asked Questions section to gain more insight on common problems.