Setting up a Departmental Web Page

All Duke faculty, students, and staff are allowed accounts on the public Unix "acpub" system, and from the acpub system anyone can serve out World Wide Web documents by placing them in a "public_html" subdirectory. This is described in detail elsewhere. It is also possible for a special directory to be set up for an individual department so that the department can make its own web pages available through that same web server. The acpub system has a limited amount of disk space available to support web pages and for security reasons cannot support the use of CGI executables. The server is maintained by professional staff at all times. If you are interested in setting up such an arrangement for your department, write to webmaster@www.duke.edu.

There are some other web servers on campus that may be able to provide web services to particular departments. Arts and Sciences Computing has established a small web server to accommodate those departments with specialized needs such as CGI executables. Also, MCIS (Medical Center Information Systems) maintains a number of web servers for use by Medical Center departments. Special arrangements for certain administrative units can be made by consultation with webmaster@www.adm.duke.edu.

Once you have a server to put your documents on, you will need to compose the documents themselves. World Wide Web documents are written in a markup language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). HTML is fairly simple, and it is not hard to pick up. Some references to basic HTML information are available. There are many students on campus who are skilled in the use of HTML; you may find that student labor is an inexpensive and effective way to get this aspect of your documents put together. Some have found that a simple post in duke.systems.www will turn up more potential help than one might expect. There are also a number of "HTML editors" around for PCs, Macs, and Unix workstations. On the acpub system, an HTML editor called asWedit has been installed. Use of such an editor may simplify some of the typing while your documents are being composed, but it will not completely free you or someone from having to be familiar with HTML in order to make your pages work as desired.

While starting to compose your documents, here are a few pointers to keep in mind:

• Graphics can greatly enhance the attractiveness of your pages, but be careful that your pages are still accessible to people with all types of web browsers, including those that do not display graphics at all
• Sparing use of a few good graphics is much more effective than overuse of graphics and graphic effects: most people are on the other end of slow links and have to wait significant amounts of time for large graphics to download
• Don't bury your information -- put your most frequently-accessed information up front where people can find it without have to traverse many links
• There are some template pages available, if you want them
• Put a contact address at the bottom of each of your pages
• Many people find it helpful if you note at the bottom of each page the last time it was modified

Once your pages are on a server and you are ready to publicize their availability, you can do so by crossposting an announcement to duke.announce and duke.systems.www. You can also have an appropriate link for your department added to the www.duke.edu web pages by writing to webmaster@www.duke.edu with the pertinent information. Arts and Sciences and Medical Center departments are listed on their respective web sites and not at www.duke.edu.

Good luck!

	-- Office of Information Technology