Evaluation of Educational Technology

I hear this sort of comment all time, and while I understand it, I have resisted giving some simple satisfaction to this demand previously. My experience has been that before you get too far into the game of making web pages, you really need to have a working knowledge of at least basic HTML-- that's what I cover in Basic HTML. And before you start working exclusively with an HTML editing software, you really should have some understanding of how this software is not really WYSIWYG-- that's what I cover in HTML Editors

But OK, I understand the need for immediate gratification. So let me try to explain how to get a very simple web page going in a few easy steps. But a little warning: if you are trying to do this by yourself (that is, you're not in one of my face-to-face classes or you're not using this site with someone who has experience making web pages), you might want to start with lesson 1 anyway. Also, you might want to print this out to make it easier to follow along as you try to do it.

Using Netscape Communicator

Step 1: Get some text from a word processing program. It could be from any word processing program, but the standard in our labs at SB is Microsoft Word. If you use a different word processing program (like WordPerfect), that would be fine as well. Really, the text could be just about anything and just about any length. For practical reasons, I'd recommend trying this with a document that is less than about 3 pages long. Also, you need to use a document where format isn't that important-- nothing with tables or charts or what-have-you.

Step 2: Open Netscape Communicator and get into the "Composer" part of the application while keeping your word processing document open. If you don't have Netscape Communicator on your computer and/or don't really know what I'm talking about here, then you probably do need to go back to lesson 1. If you do have Netscape Communicator, you get to the "composer" part by either looking under the "File" menu and selecting "New" and then under that menu "blank page," or by looking under the"Communicator" menu and selecting "Composer." Doing this will get you to a page that sort of looks like a cross between a word processing program and the Netscape Navigator window. It looks like this because that's essentially what it is, as you'll see in a few more steps.

Step 3: Click back to your word processing document, select all, copy, and then paste it into the blank window in the Netscape Composer. This is the key step, so let's walk through this together: first, you need to go back to the Microsoft Word document that will be the text on your web page. Highlight all the text on the page and select "copy" under the edit menu. Then go back to the blank window of your Netscape Composer program. Click inside that window and select "paste" under the edit menu. If you've done this correctly, the text from your word processing file should be in the Netscape Composer window. There might be a few formatting problems-- paragraph breaks missing, things bolded or not when they should be, strange characters, etc. Simply use the Netscape Composer program just like it was a word processing program to fix and change things.

Step 4: Save it. You want to be sure that you save the file as a single word with no spaces and with the ending ".html" If you are doing this project as part of the beginnings of your simple webfolio page for a class of mine, save the file as "index.html" with no capital letters and no spaces. Keep track of where you save this-- if you're in the SCCC Mac lab , that means you want to save it to a zip disk or temporally in a student folder on the hard drive.

That's it-- you've made the most simple of simple homepages.

Step 4 and a half: Play with Netscape Composer a bit. I don't want to include detailed instructions about that here because probably the best way to figure out what you can do with Netscape Composer is to play around with it a bit. Experiment with what happens if you push the different buttons you see, and look under the different menu items to see what's available. If you're more or less comfortable with the way most word processing programs work, you should have no problems figuring this out either.

Now, there are a couple other steps-- links, graphics, colors, etc.--but at least now you can progress through these "how to" pages with a web page of your very own!