Student's Guide to Creating a Home Page


Getting Started

Setting up a functional homepage is quite simple. Using Netscape Communicator you can create your homepage in less than 5 minutes. Here are the basic steps for setting up a home page in chronological order (we assume you are using unix):

It's that easy.

Creating a Web Page using Netscape Composer

Now you can create your own homepage without even knowing HTML. (Although it is still useful to learn HTML) Using different fonts, adding pictures, making tables, changing colors, using images for backgrounds can now be done pretty much by pointing and clicking. Whenever you wish to create or edit a webpage cd into your www directory and use the command open the page you want to edit, go to file in the menu bar and choose "Edit Page". This opens up the page in Netscape Composer, this will enable you to edit HTML files with an editor kind of like Microsoft Word. Here are some steps to follow : Once you save the file its on the web! The whole world can see it. Your web page will be located at http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~username You should understand the difference between the file YOURPATH/index.html and the world wide web location http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~username. The file can be accesed and changed at any time. You can look at the file by using the Open Page command (under File in the menu bar). There is a difference between opening a file and opening a location. Opening a file is like using the command more in Unix but instead of showing text files it shows HTML files. The world wide web location is updated (it reades the index.html file to see if there has been any changes) by someone else, not you. If we turn off the webserver your webpage wont be able but index.html file will still exist.

Netscape offers you TEMPLATES that you can use to start up your home-page. Open a Netscape Composer window. Then click on file. Then click one new. You will get various options as to what to open the new html file. One  of these options is the templates. http://home.netscape.com/browsers/templates/index.html

Here are some EXAMPLES  of home pages that you can copy and change to your own.

All these examples have links to web pages with personal stuff. You can create your personal stuff web page the same way you created your home page. In any case here is an example. Here is some information on how to use links.

 


HTML Basics and Examples

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is far less intimidating than it sounds. The best way to learn is by looking at a web page and the HTML code that produced it. An easy way to begin is to use another person's page as a template, and change the information to match your own Then, you can customize it more and more as you learn more HTML. Some useful information: Here are some EXAMPLES of what you can do with a homepage:

Guidelines

There are some official departmental guidelines for having a web-page. Here is a brief synopsis of the rules:
Please mail questions or comments to rafa@jhu.edu

Last updated:11/19/00