Part 3: Creating Your Own Web Page

These instructions are designed for use with Netscape Gold, or an equivalent web page editor. If you have no such editor, you will need to learn HTML, the HyperText Markup Language used to format web pages. Please refer to the no editor version of this lab page.

The first step in building your own web site is writing a homepage -- a page with information on who you are and why you're on the web.

A good way to write a web page is to start with another template web page and modify that. Find a page you like, load it into your editor (in Netscape, use the Edit button), and change it to suit your needs. Be careful to get permission to use any text or pictures that might be protected by copyright!

For students in the spring quarter 1997 course, we have installed a skeleton page already. To look at it, go up to the top of the Netscape window, where it displays the current URL. Use the mouse to select all the text after http://www.geom.umn.edu/~ and replace it by your username (e.g. xyzzy). Hit return, and Netscape will display your home page. You can give this URL http://www.geom.umn.edu/~xyzzy to your friends, and they can see your page from anywhere in the world.

We don't know you that well yet, so we didn't presume to create a specific page just for you. What you'll want to do is use the Edit feature of NetscapeGold to modify your homepage. Click the Edit button, and you'll get a separate window in which you can make changes to the text or to the links. Fill in your real name, and so forth, as a start towards customizing your page.

Eventually, your homepage should contain the following items:

• A Title. That's the name you see in the top margin of the Netscape window.
• At least one Header.
• More than one paragraph.
• A figure. So that you see how to do it, try linking to a different figure than is already included. If you have trouble thinking of a figure, link to http://www.geom.umn.edu/docs/forum/triangle_puzzle/gasket1.gif
• A link to another document. If you cannot think of a document, link to http://www.geom.umn.edu/.

When you want to save your changes, you might do so locally on a floppy disk on your Mac, but you'll also want to "publish" your page on the Geometry Center's server. To do this, select "publish" from the File menu. You need to provide your username and password (nobody else can change your page) and you need to fill in the URL to which it should be sent. Unfortunately, things aren't quite set up so that you can just use your usual homepage URL. To publish the page you need to specify it by "ftp" as ftp://geom.umn.edu/u/xyzzy/public_html which is really just another way of getting to the same place on the Geometry Center server.

If you see something in a Web document that you want to try, you can use the Document Source option in the View menu to see how it was done. If your web page editor doesn't do what you want it to, you can always edit the source code of your document directly.

To learn more about the HyperText Markup Language in which web pages are written, go to the tutorial Geometry Forum Down to Earth HTML Tutorial. This document is located in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. (If you find this to be too slow, use the Local Version. If at all possible, use the regular version, as some of the pictures will not be available in the local version.) You may also wish to refer back to the other Web pages listed under "Help Writing Hypertext" in Part 2. In addition, you can refer to the Advanced HTML Template for examples of more advanced options.

The Geometry Center Home Page

Author: Evelyn Sander
Comments to: webmaster@geom.umn.edu
Created: Jun 09 1996 --- Last modified: Tue Jun 11 14:53:28 1996