Setting Up A School Website: Getting Started On The Home Page

Once you have your account, you've downloaded the needed software, and your ISP administrator has set up web space for you that allows you to upload files to the host computer, it may be time to set up directories for your web files. This is especially helpful if your site will contain a large number of files, each of a differing type. Here is a list of some of the types of files one might place on their school's website:

HTML files (these are made up of ASCII text).
Graphics: GIF or JPG files. These files can be generated by any graphics program, or they can be taken from other web documents. Additional information on this topic can be found here.
Map files: For image maps (hyper-graphics that can be clicked on by the user to go to another part of the website. This type of file requires a directory called a CGI-BIN (Common Gateway Interface-Binary), which must be set up by your ISP administrator. Other forms of interactivity such as forms, counters, and scripts would find their way to this directory.
Audio and video files.

Each type of file may need its own directory. All of these files will most likely reside in a specific directory on your ISP's web server called the /FTP/PUB directory. This allows the public (you) to send files to that directory. So, North High's web documents can be found within Frednet's /ftp/pub directory at /ftp/pub/nhhs. (Note the starting slash. This is peculiar to UNIX machines, which much of the Internet works on. Even though you may be accessing you ISP via a graphical interface such as WS-FTP, you will still need to know how to navigate from directory to directory. The first slash (/) is one helpful tip. North High's HTML documents reside within the subdirectory /nhhs/html. So if I want to upload documents to that directory, I would tell WS-FTP to change directory to /ftp/pub/nhhs/html. Then double-click to send the file. Get it?

Caution: Each directory created must be reflected in the commands included in your web document. If I want Netscape (or any browser) to look for a file in /ftp/pub/nhhs/html, then I would include the command:

<a href="/nhhs/html/file.htm">link text</a>.

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To HTML: The Language of the Web

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