Website tips and tricks
This page provides information and resources you can use to create and maintain websites. See website design tips for frequently asked questions. See web accessibility resources for links to sites about how those with disabilities access the Web and how to create websites that are accessible to them.
Expression Web |
Geocities/NC Classes Online |
FTP programs |
Free clipart and backgrounds |
Language translation |
Creating pdf files
Expression Web
- Elon students and faculty are able to obtain Microsoft's Expression Web for installation on their Windows computers. The CD can be borrowed overnight from Campus Technology Support's Helpdesk or purchased for a small fee.
- For assistance using Expression Web including simplified templates and handouts to get you going quickly, take advantage of my simplified Expression Web templates.
Geocities and NC Classes Online
- Anyone can create a free account with
Geocities and publish a
website there; however, because it is free, there are certain
limitations.
- The most serious drawback to a free account from a teacher standpoint is that there are advertisements down the right side of the page.
- Another drawback is that files created offline must be uploaded one at a time using the easy upload feature provided by Geocities. That means you cannot publish an entire site with its pages, templates, style sheets, and images all at one time.
- NC Classes Online is a collaborative effort between
the state of North Carolina and Geocities aimed at providing teachers a way
to easily create and maintain a classroom website. To make use of NC Classes Online, you need to
have an existing or create a new free geocities account and be a
current or prospective teacher. Your
geocities username can then be authenticated by a
designated NC Classes Online liaison (Barbara Taylor is that person
at Elon University; there should also be a liaison for each school
system). Once authenticated, your geocities account
has all the same features and tools that it had before, but in
addition, you will have:
- An advertisement-free website
- The ability to use an FTP program to transfer files to/from the web server
- Two other limitations are NOT overcome by
having your account authenticated.
- One is a limit of 15MB of storage space, but since your web pages (html files) and clipart (gif files) are very small, this will only be a problem if you publish a lot of large files, for example, jpeg images that have not been resized.
- The more serious limitation is the data transfer limit of 4MB per hour. For example, if a presentation is 1000 KB (1 MB), after it or another file of that size is opened 4 times within one hour, your site will be temporarily unavailable for an hour due to the data transfer limit having been exceeded. When saving Word or PowerPoint documents as pdf files, be sure to reduce their size by choosing the option for "minimize size" Check the help file from geocities about data transfer limit.
Stand-alone FTP programs
While most programs designed to create websites (like Expression Web) provide a built-in "publishing" option that uses FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to upload your new or changed pages from your "local" site to a "remote" site on the Web, sometimes they are finicky and result in frustrating delays getting your work published. There are also times when you are somewhere without access to your web design program (like Expression Web) and you want to quickly upload a document you've created or download a file and make changes to it and upload it again. That's where a stand-alone FTP program comes in handy - its sole purpose is to transfer files to/from local/remote locations.
FTP for Windows
- WinSCP is such a program for Windows machines. It is free and can be downloaded for installation from the WinSCP downloads page.
- WS_FTP LE is no longer available as a free download and has been replaced with WS_FTP Home which must be purchased. However, Elon makes available an older version of WS_FTP LE that was licensed when it was free. It can be downloaded from the Elon help desk downloads page.
FTP for Macs
- Fetch is an FTP program for use with Macs. It is not free to individuals, but Elon has a free license that allows Elon to distribute licensed copies of Fetch to their employees and students free of charge, and as a student or teacher, you can easily apply for a free educational license.
Sources of free educational clipart
Check these sites for sources of FREE educational clipart. Be SURE you READ the note on each page describing how you are allowed to use them (see terms of use, copyright/use information, or similar link). Some sites (like Discovery School) limit the number of separate images you can use for free. Many sites require that you credit their site and link back to it. Note that when they say NOT to link to their clipart, they don't mean not to link to their site when giving credit. Instead they mean you should download the images and put them on your site instead of linking to the image on their site; if everyone did this, the sites would come to a halt from the excessive traffic.
- Image and clipart libraries through your Livetext subscription - open a document that has a resources section in it; edit the resources, and depending on when you purchased Livetext, choose either "Add Discovery Education streaming" or "Add Learn360 Video."
- Discovery School's Clip Art Gallery
- Webweaver's Free Clipart
- The Teacher's Guide
- Teachnet.com's free educational clipart
- Awesome Clipart for Educators
- Background City
- AAA Backgrounds - Free Backgrounds
Translating pages to another language
Online translation tools have limitations since they translate text literally. To understand the difficulties, I used the Babel Fish translation tool to translate this paragraph to Spanish and then translate the resulting text back to English. You can see that we did not end up where we started.
After translating above paragraph to Spanish and back to English:
The translation tools in line have limitations since they translate the text literally. In order to understand the difficulties, I used the tool of translation of the fish of Babel to translate this paragraph to the Spanish and later to translate the text that was again to English. You can see that we did not finish for above where we began.
Babel Fish
Babel Fish is popular and has been around a while. If you choose to use it, you may just provide a link to the tool as I have above where the reader will need to copy the text to be translated or the url of the page to be translated. If you prefer to have the graphic shown below to translate the current page to languages represented by the countries' flags, use the directions for how to Add Babel Fish translation to your site. You will need to copy the provided html code into the code of each page on which you want the translation graphic/tool to appear. It will not display in the editor, but will when you use Preview.
Google translation
For some reason, as of now, Babel Fish is unable to translate pages created in Expression Web; it generates a translation of the html code instead of what the viewer sees in the web browser. As an alternative, Google Language Tools seems to work fine; the web address of the page to be translated or a passage of text can be copied and pasted as described above for Babel Fish.
Creating pdf files
When you post Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) on your website, you are making the assumption that people viewing your website have those programs installed on the computer from which they are viewing your website. This is even more complex now that Office 2007 documents are not easily opened on machines running earlier versions of Office (unless the compatibility update is installed).
The advantage of pdf files is that viewing them requires only the free downloadable Adobe Reader. Creating pdf files is becoming easier. Here are a few tips:
- Creating PDF files is a built-in option on a Mac running OSX and can be accomplished by choosing Print from the File menu of any program and then choosing the button labeled Save as PDF. Be sure to change the filename so that the resulting pdf file has .pdf as its extension.
- On a Windows machine running Microsoft Office 2007, a Save as pdf add-in can be downloaded and installed so that in Office 2007 programs, saving as a pdf file is an option. This add-in should already be available on Elon machines. Be sure to note the option to "Optimize for minimum size" that is sufficient for publishing pdf documents online and will greatly reduce the file size.
- Creating a pdf file in other programs or in older versions of Office on a Windows machine requires Adobe Acrobat (not the free, downloadable Adobe Acrobat Reader, but Acrobat itself). However, you can visit PDF Online to generate pdf files online for free or download the free program, PrimoPDF.