Additional Tips for the Final Hist. 378 Web Project
Topics
1) Home [main] Page Design Issues :
The home page, the main entrance to your web site, should be short -- ideally only one- or two-screens worth of information and graphics that serve as a "portal" or door to your site, and definitely no more than two screen's --- by this I mean that to go from the top to the bottom readers would only have to hit the "Page Down" button in their keyboards once or twice.
Please reserve detailed information about yourself or your favorite websites [the links] for the personal and/or the links pages, respectively. If you have excessive stuff on your home page, just open all three pages in the Editor and cut and past the surplus stuff over to where it should go. If your haven't figured out how to switch from one opened page to another in the Editor, please notice that there are two arrows in the toolbar, one pointing left, the other pointing right. When you have more than one page opened in the editor, one or both of these arrows will change to a light blue color, allowing you to switch from one opened page to another, back and forth.
2) Please identify yourself on your home page as a Trinity student.
Your home page should indicate that this is the web site of "Firstname Lastname," and that you created this site as part of your Hist. 378, "Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans," a course taught at Trinity College, in Hartford, CT. You should then put hyperlinks to the class web site [http://frontpage.trincoll.edu/h378] and to Trinity's home page [http://www.trincoll.edu].
3) Please put also an automatic link to your email address on your name to facilitate viewers sending you messages commenting on your site, following this procedure:
a) open your home page in the FrontPage Editor
b) use the mouse to select the text of your name
c) click on the "hyperlink" button, or select "Insert - Hyperlink" from the main menu in FrontPage Editor
d) on the box that pops up, please notice the series of icons to the right of the blank where normally your would write an URL or web address. One of the, the third from left to right to be precise, looks like a yellow envelop. Click on it.
e) a new, small form will pop up, allowing you to enter your FULL email address, as in: firstname.lastname@trincoll.edu -- Do it, and then click OK.
f) please notice that FrontPage has inserted automatically a command in the URL blank for sending you an email. Click OK to finish the procedure and return to your document.
g) you should notice that your name is now highlighted and underlined, indicating that a hyperlink is behind it.
Your might wonder, how will this work when some one reads my page? Very simple: if the viewer has done his/her homework when installing Netscape or Internet Explorer, they have told the web browser which one is their email program. Thus, when they view your page, and click on your name and its mail hyperlink, the browser program opens automatically the email program, creates a new message, and inserts your email address, so that the only thing the view has to do is fill the subject line, write the contents of the email, and send it.
There various types of graphics use in the web -- there are photos and other complex images that use many colors [over 200 in most cases] that require the image be save in a format called JPEG or JPG developed by a photographers group. A second, simpler type are images that use fewer colors and are more simple, these are usually saved in a format called GIF. Another difference between these two types is the SIZE OF THE FILE, JPEG's are larger files, GIFs are smaller. Yet both of these two basic types are static images.
Then there's the use of "pictures that move" -- there are two types here, as well: simple images [fewer colors, smaller graphics] that are in a special GIF format called "animated GIF" that move by using a trick we all did when kids: you take a notebook, draw a dog with the tail up in the first page, and then you draw the same dog with the tail at a slightly lower angle on every page until after a few pages you draw the dog with the tail down, and then draw more images with the tail appearing ever so slightly more up, and so forth. Then you take the book at the edge and flip the pages quickly, and the dog seems to move the tail on its own. Animated GIFs are simply collections of GIFs put together a if they were examples like this dog picture. You can have this in your pages, and I will send you later a web address that will help, BUT.... please understand that (a) some of theses Animated GIFs are annoying to most people, and essential distract from the other content in your page [that's why there are the favorites of advertisers!]; (b) you should concentrate first in getting the basic skills alright, then we will deal with more sophisticated stuff.
There's another, still more complex type of "moving pictures" that are created with very sophisticated graphics programs that are produce nicer, more subtle animations. Yet learning this is well beyond our purposes. Indeed, I will be receiving professional training to be able to produce these type. An example of these type of "multimedia" moving pictures is the animated demo of FrontPage produced by Microsoft to explain how FrontPage works, using a program called Shockwave. I included the link in the workshop web page.
5) Students have asked before: "I want to know how you go about taking information from the web and placing on your page without taking all of the information. Is it cutting and pasting?" Here's a quick but not unproblematic answer:
You should be careful with that! Yes, you can use the mouse cursor to select, copy, and paste text [and graphics] from the web, but you could easily end up violating federal copyright laws! The best way to deal with this is to: (a) use them as you would use quotes from a book, by writing your own stuff, then putting a short quote from the source within quotation marks, and then providing the reference, which would include the title and exact address of the specific page, and the date when the information appeared [since many pages are updated, the info might not be there the next time you visit them]. Finally, you should hyperlink that reference to their website so people can go there.
As for graphics, the general rule is that you can't just copy pictures from other websites unless you have a written [or emailed] permission from their legitimate owners. On the other hand, there is an argument that you could use graphics found in printed publications as long as you give the source, just like you would do with a direct quote used in one of your papers. Of course, you would have to scan the images yourself. However, before you try this strategy, be aware that this could represent a violation of copyright laws, too.
In sum, there are very contentious guidelines on the use of copyrighted materials for educational, non-commercial purposes like ours, with lawyers, users, programmers, educators, government officials, and others fighting over what's legal and what's not legal. I will have more to say about this in a later message.
6) "I have inserted an image in a web page, but I having trouble placing it properly in relation to adjoining text. What should I do to place these graphics properly?
This is one of those things that usually requires some HTML coding, but you that can manage adequately using FrontPage Editor. First, while you have your web page loaded in the Editor and on your screen, go to the image, click ONCE on it, then click the RIGHT mouse button, bringing up a floating menu that includes the item "Image Properties," which you will immediately select.
This brings up a box or form which allows you to control a lot of things regarding how your image is displayed on your web page. Of immediate concern is the relationship of image to surrounding or neighboring text, so you should select the third tab at the top of the box, labeled "Appearance" [pretty obvious, isn’t it?]. Next, click on the list of options for "Alignment" – it is here where the phrase "The Devil is in the details" comes into play, because you have to learn by trial and error how do you best align images with text depending on the specific effect you want to achieve on your page or on this portion of your page.
Be careful, however, option LEFT will put the image next to the left margin, so that the text will wrap around its right side; RIGHT will, of course, put the image next to the right margin, with text wrapping around the left side of the image. The other options will look good or not depending on the relationship between the size of the image and the size of the paragraph most closely associated with it. Once you select an "Alignment" option, click "OK" to see how it looks now. Once you have tinkered with the various alternatives and like a particular look, SAVE YOUR WORK.
7) Use the MLA Style for citing World Wide Web Sources:
8) Procedure for linking citations and a bibliographical list of references:
Given the hypertextual characteristics of the medium, references should have hyperlinks to the specific source(s) in the bibliography. This can be done by creating a hyperlink on every reference in the text of the essay that when clicked sends the user to the bibliography.
Now a problem arises, because you might have so many references that the user has to scroll up and down everytime to check a specific source. The way to deal with this is by creating BOOKMARKS for each item in the bibliography, so that clicking on a specific reference in the text, let's say, for example, Morris 1995, sends you directly to
Morris, Nancy. 1995. Puerto Rico: Culture, Politics, and Identity.
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995).How do you do this in FrontPage? You use the following procedure in FrontPage EDITOR:
a) put the cursor where you want the bookmark to go. In the example above, to the left of Morris' lastname.
b) In the main [top] menu of the Editor, select EDIT -- BOOKMARK
c) a box comes up; give the bookmark a name, in this case Morris1995, just as I typed it here. Then click OK.
d) now, when you insert a reference to Morris' book in the text of your essay using the more or less standard (Morris 1995: 35) format, you create a hyperlink to the full reference in the bibliography. To do this just select the citation, use the regular menu or toolbar button to create a hyperlink, and when the Insert Hyperlink form comes up, just use the Bookmark option that appears on the bottom left corner of the form by clicking on the drop-down menu and selecting the bookmark [in this case, Morris1995]. Click OK [and, as always, save your file!
This page will be updated as needed between now and the end of the Final Exams period.
Last Update: Monday, January 17, 2000
Hist. 378 Home Page | FrontPage Workshop | Follow Up Instructions | Top of this Page