Community Services for Adelphi, Maryland

by Cynthia A. Lockley

a woman for all seasons

The World Wide Web and How to Get into It

Note: This presentation is from 1995 and has not been updated.

Presentation • Workshop

This page provides the overheads used in a talk and workshop presented by Cynthia A. Lockley to the ACE-NIPS conference at the University of Maryland University College on 14 June 1996. An earlier version of the talk was presented on 12 December 1995 to the Washington, D.C. Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. The subject is about technical issues associated with the creation and maintenance of home pages on the World Wide Web with an introduction to the basics of HTML, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. A hands-on workshop provides experience with building your own home page using HTML and graphics.

Note: Some hypertext links may take you to Portable Document Format (PDF) files that you can view in your Web browser. If you can't view the PDF files, test whether your browser is set up with a PDF helper application by testing a file in the helper application test page. Click on the test button to see whether the application comes up and you can view the sample file used by the test.

If you don't have a PDF helper application (Adobe Acrobat Exchange or Adobe Acrobat Reader), follow the instructions for downloading and installing the Acrobat Reader or Acrobat Exchange.

Before you begin:

• Be sure you have either the Adobe Acrobat Reader or the Adobe Acrobat Exchange installed on your computer.
• Check that your browser is configured to use the Acrobat Reader or Acrobat Exchange tool.
• Close PDF files after you've read them. With Acrobat Exchange, only 10 PDF files can be open at the same time.
• Reset your browser window to full screen.

Presentation

• Cover
• Agenda
• What is the World Wide Web?
• Have you ever encountered the following on the Web? Fatal error 500
  To understand this, you need to understand URLs, fatal errors, and forbidden entry
• Why should you have a home page?
  • Personal benefits and goals
  • Work benefits and goals
    A good example of a corporate home page as done by the IBM Corporation
  • Negative aspects
• How do you create a home page?
• Basic HTML tags
• Design and human interface considerations

  Balance pages with contrast and visual relief. Create visual and functional continuity in your site's organization, graphic design, and typography. A careful, systematic approach to page design can simplify navigation and reduce user errors.

• Optimizing graphics
• This is my favorite tool for picking colors for text, links, and backgrounds is the Color Picker II
• There is also a good site on the Web for an image map tutorial
  
  Be sure to check how your pages look on several browsers and how they print out. Here is a a page with an image map and related links from the State of Maryland Web site (December 3, 1995) as seen and printed from the IBM WebExplorer browser (the information in the button selections doesn't print):

  

  and here is the same page as seen in Netscape on a Macintosh computer and printed to the same printer (the information in the button selections prints):

  

  This problem was eliminated when the page was redesigned.

• Web sites for tools and resources
• Now that you have a home page, how do you put it on the Web?

  You can try wishing for access such as this little girl:

  
  from The New Yorker

• How to find an Internet Service Provider (ISP)
  • List of ISPs by Area Code
• Design and human interface sites on the Web
• Reading material: books and trade journals
• Glossaries and computer virus information
• Now that you have your home page up and running, you can take a rest

  
  from The New Yorker

• Questions and Answers

Workshop

The workshop gives you hands-on experience for creating an HTML file and previewing it in the browser.

Return to the World Wide Web Resources, part 1