Web Authoring at Colby College: an Overview

1. There are two types of pages at Colby- personal and departmental. To create a personal page you must first activate your personal directory. (Everyone is allocated 10 MB of space in their personal directory.) There are no stylistic guidelines for personal pages but Colby's Web policy and ethical standards apply. There is a tutorial to get you started.

2. Departmental pages are subject to Colby's style guidelines. A Web committee has been established as a central point for requesting help with all aspects of creating and maintaining departmental pages. Documentation is on the Web Help site.

3. There are many resources at Colby for learning how to make Web pages. ITS workshops and online tutorials cover HTML as well as the Dreamweaver editor. The Windows computers in Miller Street lab and the iMacs in the right wing of the Lovejoy Lab have self-paced HTML training modules from webSavant. Dreamweaver self-paced training is also installed there.

We highly recommend that any Web author become comfortable with at least the beginning level of HTML, even if s/he intends to use an editor.

4.Books on HTML, BBEdit, Dreamweaver,Flash, Fireworks, Javascript and Frontpage* are at the Miller Library reserve desk.

*Frontpage is not supported at Colby -we provide the books for your convenience but we do not provide training or troubleshooting services for it.

5. A limited number of Keyserved licenses are available for Dreamweaver. It's also installed on all computers in the Davis Educational Foundation Electronic-Research Classroom in Miller library, and all iMacs in the right wing of the Lovejoy 400 lab.

6.Once created, pages can be uploaded to the Colby Web server with Fetch (Mac) and WS_FTP (Windows). Both are installed on all Colby-owned computers and are available over the Colby local network from the General Server.

7. Adobe Acrobat Distiller/PDFWriter (for creating PDF files) is available from the software library . The free application Acrobat Reader is required to open PDF files. PDF files, once created, are uploaded to the Web server and treated like any other Web documents- their filenames should end in ".pdf"

8. BBEdit(Mac) is another editing program (available over the Colby local network from the software library) that helps in writing or correcting HTML . There is a Visual Quickstart reference book on BBEdit on reserve at Miller Library. 1stPage is the BBedit equivalent for Windows machines- you can download it for free! We have no reference materials on 1stpage, but its built-in tutorial is good.

9. Faculty can easily convert their Word documents, such as syllabi, into Web documents with this tutorial.