Overview. Let's think for a moment about what you've accomplished so far. You have become familiar with Netscape Composer. You've spent considerable time exploring examples of portfolios made by other students, begun to define how you want your portfolio to look and what you want it to contain.

You are now ready to begin publishing your WebPages. (I know that for some of you, this is a familiar activity, while for others, this will be the beginning of your future as a web publisher.)

The major goal for this week is to be sure everyone knows how to publish a webpage to their "web" folder at Cortland. Let me say that for some of you this will be easy, while for others it will be a bit confusing. 

I would like you to keep four rather different skills in mind:

1. Acquiring the technical skills for publishing pages from local computer to Cortland server.
2. Organization and discipline for keeping your files and folders well organized in your thumb drive or on your computer.
3. Conceptual understanding and ideas about the content and purpose of your Web portfolio.
4. Design skills for creating WebPages that look the way you ideally would wish.

#1 is our priority this week: Learning to publish your first page using FTP (file transfer protocol). Once you've figured this out, you won't have to spend more time on it. And accomplishing this step will give you the satisfaction of knowing that for the rest of your life you can publish your thoughts to a worldwide audience.

# 2 Being well organized is a discipline or habit of the heart we all need to work on in all aspects of our lives. It's like keeping one's closets well organized (or trying to). The reason this is so important in creating your website is that if you are not careful, you will do things like lose files, or write over files, or create filenames that make no sense, and so on.

I cannot emphasize enough that you must become very attentive to the names you give your files, including being careful to pay attention to such details as whether the file ends in .htm or .html. When the assignment calls for you to publish with a specific filename (I'll Bold the name), you must publish with that name.

#3 will grow throughout the course and beyond. You're well on your way toward this one.

# 4 Teaching yourself Web design skills... is an open ended horizon. In this course I will urge you to keep things simple, even as many of you will wish your website was as dazzling as Disney's. But the key point here is that once you get started, you can add to the set of "tricks" or "tools" one by one forever. I point you to tutorials (see links to tutorial in Week 4) and other sources of good ideas for your future learning. But first let's be sure everyone has published a homepage.

Publishing Your Homepage

Starting Your Homepage. Using netscape, you should begin by creating a simple "index.html" page, which is also commonly referred to as your "homepage." The name "index.html" is a special name that Web browsers look for first in a file folder.

You should begin by making a simple page that will serve as your opening page when someone comes to your website. You have seen lots of examples in earlier assignments, so you should have in mind the way you'd like your homepage to look. You will be able to revise it, so the main thing for this first assignment is to show that you have been successful in publishing to your web folder.

Some people begin by putting their name and address and then say something like "Welcome to my website." And then say something about yourself, where you are teaching, and what, etc. Feel free to add graphics, photos, change colors of backgrounds, text, etc. if you know how or later in the course.

Specific Assignment.

1. Make sure you store all files including images in your thumb drive and don't forget to take the thumb drive with you. 

2. Create one nice looking page to serve as your "homepage." The Netscape Composer  works much like Word, so you should find it relatively easy to open a new file (blank page) and create a first page and spice it up a little bit.

3. Save your page to your thumb drive and with the name of "index.html"
[This is important: "index.html" is the standard or default filename for the first page in your web folder.]
[Don't save it under any other name... such as "myindex.htm" or "index.htm".]

4. Check out how your page looks in a browser by opening it in Netscape Composer or Internet Explorer to see how it will look when you publish it. 

5. At this point, you have your homepage on your hard drive. The next step is to publish it to your Web folder at Cortland. You need to understand and FTP ("File Transport Protocol")

6. You also need to understand how Cortland provides you with your web folder in your web space. Your homepage web address (URL) should be: 

http://web.cortland.edu/userID/ (if you created a file named "index.html" and publised/FTPed it onto the Cortland web server. Your userID is the first part of your Cortland email address).

If you still have questions, Go to: http://acs.cortland.edu/acs.techhelp.html  Click Web Pages/Exchange

You can also phone (607) 753-2500 or (607) 753-5599 or email Technology Center at  helpdesk@cortland.edu for technical help in addition to getting help from this course and from me your instructor.

Acknowledgement: Dr. Patrick Dickson.