Before You Begin Creating Your Site

Plan Your Content

You should plan out content you want on your site. Specifically, you should know whether you want one long page or several pages of content before you begin. If you want several pages, decide what pages should be in your navigation. Some suggestions for pages/content to include on your site:

  • Home (intro/welcome statement, maybe a short bio)
  • Research Interests
  • Publications
  • CV
  • Contact Information

Does Your Content Belong on the Individual Page Server?

The Individual Page Server is a resource for faculty to to share individual academic and research materials. Here are examples of things that should not go on the Individual Page Server:

  • Department/program information (e.g., conferences) should go on your department's web site. Contact your site maintainer or web@wcas.northwestern.edu for assistance
  • Lab/research groups sites should also go on your department's web site. Space can also be created separate from the department site for your group (contactweb@wcas.northwestern.edu)
  • Course-specific information should be hosted on the Course Management System(Blackboard)
  • Collaborative projects should be hosted on Depot
  • Personal or commercial sites should be hosted with a third-party provider

Understand How the Web Works (in one paragraph)

A web site is simply a collection of files, usually HTML documents (for the text) and images or style documents as needed. You create these files on your computer and upload (put) them to the web server for the world to see. These templates give you a starting point for creating your site. In specific they provide you a simple design layout for you to start entering your content.

Adobe Contribute Tips

#1: To create a line break without a line space, hold the shift key as you tap the "Enter" key.

Contribute indent button

#2: Need to indent a single line, or one or more paragraphs, of text? Use the indent button (see image) NOT the space bar. Why? Because using the spacebar will result in a string of non-breaking spaces that could size differently on different browsers, resulting in a ragged left margin, or create awkward and unnatural sentence wrapping.

Detailed information about using Contribute is also available on this site.

July 12, 2010