Web Pages
CLIPR provides web-hosting capabilities for faculty, staff, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. To create a web presence for yourself or your lab, the first thing you need is a fileserver account. Please contact Jon or Ernie for the creation of this account. (You can find out more about fileserver accounts and how to access them by going to this topic from the navigation menu.)
Your fileserver account has a folder in it called “Sites.” This is the folder our webserver software looks in for files to display on the web. By default, the webserver looks for a file called “index.html” or “home.html”. If you name your home page with either of these filenames you don't need to include the filename in the URL you refer to elsewhere. That is, your URL will be of the form “http://psych.colorado.edu/~username”, where “username” is your fileserver account username (and yes, the tilde is critical). “Sites” can be left out of the path because the server software is looking in this folder by default.
The most common way to manage your website is to create the site html files on your laptop or desktop computer and then move the files to the Sites folder on your fileserver account. See the “Fileserver Accounts” section of these pages for instructions on moving files to the server.
Software
HTML files can be created with any simple text editor. Be wary of Microsoft Word as this application may add a lot of extraneous junk code if you’re not careful. However, if you need software to help you create the HTML, two common choices are Adobe’s Dreamweaver or Apple’s iWeb. Both applications are available on all the machines in CLIPR’s E329 lab (or can be purchased with academic discount through Linda). Please contact Ernie if you need help configuring either of these applications to talk to your fileserver account properly.
The main difference between Dreamweaver and iWeb is that Dreamweaver assumes greater knowledge of HTML, etc. It’s a much more powerful program and therefore has a steeper learning curve. The reward for this learning curve is more flexibility in terms creating layouts and far simpler underlying HTML (which comes in handy if anyone else ever has to edit/maintain your site). With iWeb, on the other hand, it is easier to create a layout straightaway if you have no experience (e.g., the application comes with several templates). Somewhat paradoxically, the underlying code iWeb generates is more complicated than than Dreamweaver’s, but this isn’t necessarily an issue unless you desire to have complete control over the look and feel of your web page(s).