CREATING A COURSE WEB SITE

By

SHAKILA YACOB

This two-day workshop is designed to give you hands-on training in creating a simple web page on the World Wide Web. A course web site will help the student's learning process and your teaching experience. You don't need to be a computer expert to design a good web page. All you need is just a little patience and practice.

CONTENT

• Introduction to WWW
• Guidelines to create a course web site
• Basic HTML
• HTML references and tips

GUIDELINES to Build A Course Web Site.

(Do's and Don'ts)

A front page is like a front door to your home. It should have the following criteria:

Links to all the other pages on your web site.

Front page should include title, index, information about the author and information that students need to know about the sites content.

What should you put in your course web site?
• Course outline

• Recommended readings/Bibliography

• Links to relevant web sites

• Assignment topics

• Lecture notes (Suitable for courses that use formulas)

• Course Evaluation

• Selected student's assignments

Supporting pages for front page should have a common theme and a format and styles that complement the front page.

Do create a set of shorter pages rather than one long page. This will better accommodate the growth of your site.

Include graphics that is relevant and be able to display a theme. Use the minimum number of graphics and reuse it whenever possible. This reduces the download time because the browser has stored the graphic on your browser's disks cache.

Coordinate the color of your background with the color of your text. Use a background color even if you use a graphic background. If the user's graphics are off, they are not going to enjoy white text on a white background. White backgrounds is easier to organize. And you can just add any colour. Using black/dark backgrounds can create a nice contrasting effect.You can use white or brightly colored text, however, too much bright text is not advisable.

Your name and e-mail address should be placed strategically. Include the date of your most recent update of your web page. All this should be in the standard footer.For example, you can insert this statement: Last Modified: 10^th October 1997.

Please put something special to encourage your students to return to your site. Include useful articles, hints, tips and guides for students.

Include a good set of links that you find helpful or interesting to your students.

Give credit where credit is due. Please give credit to those who took the time and dedication producing graphics, ideas etc. Some may allow you to download graphics with condition that you place a link to their page in your page.

Before you announce, your web pages on-line, you should check them all first for accessibility, consistency and layout.

Visit each individual page, make sure the URL is working and you have uploaded the pages to the correct directory.

Check each link on each page and make sure they work correctly.

Check whether contents are laid out neatly and logically, visitors are able to go or jump from one page to another easily, colours and graphic blend together and the text and graphic content flow smoothly.

TIPS:Please reload the browser after updating documents. The browser will always load the page from memory. Once it is loaded, the user simply needs to click "reload" on Netscape or "refresh" on Microsoft Explorer to be able to view the updated copy.

Remember, not everyone on the Internet has the same computer hardware/software. Do avoid new technology, new software application such as frames, animated graphics, java applications and extremely large graphics. Anyway, you can insert this statement in the standard footer:

"This site is best viewed with MSIE 4".