Study Guides: Creating your Site

To complete the major assignments for this course, you will need to activate, set up, and use your CSU web space. This web space is provided to all CSU students as a part of ITP Choice. If you are already using your CSU email account, your web space is also already available. If you have not already activated your CSU email/web space, you should complete the form available at the Hub now.

Software

Important: DO NOT use Microsoft Word to create any document that you plan to move to the Web. Word's "Save as Webpage" feature produces bloated, broken HTML files that will not function properly. If you want spell checking and other text editing features (and you should), use Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage.

FrontPage is part of the software package included with your technology fee. If you would like to use it, you will need to go to the Hub to have FrontPage installed on your laptop. Unfortunately, Frontpage is a limited program that does not adequately support XHTML and style sheets (CSS), which we will use in this class. 

Fortunately, the machines in the UC 150 media lab give us access to Macromedia Dreamweaver, an industry-standard Web design and maintenance tool. You will learn to use a few basic Dreamweaver functions as a part of our class.

The following directions refer to Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. (A separate study guide explains Cascading Style Sheets.)

Setting up your site on your flash drive

Insert your drive or disk into the lab computer. Using the "My documents" button on your desktop, navigate to your flash drive. Create the following folders and subfolders:

  • Offline 3710 files
  • Writing for Digital Media
    • 3710
      • experiments
      • portfolio
      • project2
      • quizzes

Next, open Macromedia Dreamweaver. In Dreamweaver, you should create a site using the "Sites > Manage Sites" menu items and name it "csu00000" [replacing the zeros with your csu number. The remote information for this site is as follows:

  • Access: FTP
  • Host: student.claytonstate.net
  • Host directory: [leave blank]
  • Login: csu00000 [replace with your csu email address]
  • Password: [leave blank]

Important: DO NOT fill in the blank that automatically saves your password.  If you save your password on the lab machine, you increase the chances that someone will mistakenly erase or change your web site. Instead, leave the password field blank so that Dreamweaver will prompt you for your password when you connect to your remote site.

Make sure that the "Local view" is selected in the Files panel. You should see the folders that you already created on your Flash drive.

When you are done, the folders--displayed in green in Dreamweaver's "Files" panel--should look similar to the graphic below. (Ignore the three files below the "quizzes" folder for now.)

dw folders

The next step will be to create your home page for the course. This process is detailed on the Project 1 directions page.