Setting Up Your Academic Website A Writing Program PDS

This PDS will cover the steps necessary for you to set up a course website: Requesting your WWW Space Downloading FileZilla (or another FTP) Client Designing and Linking website components Creating html files Uploading and updating files Incorporating a course blog I will run through the above steps briefly, but I want to give you an opportunity to play around with web design and to ask questions. Interrupt at any point when you have questions.

Step 1: Requesting Your WWW Space As an instructor at UK, you have space on the university’s WWW server available to you. All you have to do is request that an account be set up for you. Do this by contacting Jennifer Walton. Send Jen an e-mail, and she’ll send the WWW request to the appropriate bureaucratic office. Depending on the backlog, you’ll have your webspace anywhere from one-day to six years in the future.

FTP Software To move files from your local computer to the internet, you’ll need an FTP client (unless you’re Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, in which case you’ll need tubes: “They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”) Really, though, I’d recommend FileZilla: http://filezilla-project.org/ It’s free and easy to use!

Designing and Linking Website Components If you can create a document in Microsoft Word, then you can create a webpage. In fact, we’ll even be using Microsoft Word during this workshop. Microsoft Word allows you to save documents as html (web) files, so let’s go in and play around with that. By the end of the following section, you should know how to save files, name your pages, and link them together. (A series of tubes…)

Uploading Files (Clicking and Dragging)

Incorporating a Course Blog Every time you want to update something on your website, you’ll have to go through the same process: open and update your local file, save the changes, and then upload to the website. A course blog can offer you an easier way to disseminate information to your students. Online blogs such as WordPress or Blogger allow you to set up these free websites. I’ll show you mine as an example when we go through my course website.