Getting Started
Careful planning helps to ensure that you create a site that serves both the goals of your organization and the goals of those who visit your site. When developing your new site we recommend taking the following steps. Links within the list will guide you to additional resources.
Please take note of the fact that the building of the site is actually fairly far down the list. Just as one doesn't begin mixing a cake until reading the recipe and collecting the ingredients, one doesn't start building a site until knowing what content will be needed and how it will be arranged.
- Read the "Planning your Web site tutorial." This guide will walk you through the process of assessing your goals, identifying your target audience, creating a site map, and developing content.
- Select a place to house your site. Case users may apply for an account on the main Case server, an individual school's server, or a departmental server. Space for personal or university use is also available at http://filer.case.edu. Users with particular needs may also consider an outside Web hosting provider.
- Build your site map and review it with members of your project team or department.
- Begin collecting and writing content. In most cases this will be a team effort which could take some time. Give each team member a copy of the site map, a specific assignment and a deadline. Content development can take some time, so while you wait to receive this information you can begin working on steps 5-7.
- Familiarize yourself with HTML. While you will most likely use Dreamweaver to build your site, even a very basic understanding of HTML will help you produce cleaner code that results in more attractive and stable Web pages.
- Familiarize yourself with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is used to control how various elements of the Case sites look—such as fonts, masthead image, headers, etc. In most cases you will not need to change these, but it will help to understand how they are used.
- Download Dreamweaver from the Software Center. Not listed by itself, Dreamweaver is a component of Adobe Creative Suite. If unfamiliar with the software, you may wish to experiment a bit before working with your real site. CaseLearns also offers classes in Dreamweaver.
- Download the appropriate Case templates from the Web toolkit.
- Build the home page of your site. Open template-main.html and save it as index.html in the directory in which you will be keeping your site files. Following the guidelines on Building your site: The Front Page, edit the page to incorporate the content developed by you and your team. Upload this page, your CSS folder and your images folder to see how the page looks online.
- Build the secondary and tertiary pages of your site, taking care to upload them as you work to check that they work. You may do this by selecting the template file of your choice and saving it with a descriptive filename either in your main site directory or within subdirectories as indicated by your site map.
- View your pages in your preferred Web browser and other leading Web browsers. If you normally use Mozilla or Firefox, be sure to check the site in Internet Explorer or vice versa. I would also recommend checking the site (or at least a few sample pages) in Safari and Opera. Note: Given the plethora of browsers it is impossible to test them all, so we recommend focusing on those most likely to be used by your target audience. You do not need to check Internet Explorer on the Macintosh as it is no longer supported by Microsoft. Macintosh users will be better served by Firefox or Safari.
- Validate your pages to ensure there are no coding errors. It is probably best to do this as you work rather than waiting until the whole site is complete. This will help you catch errors early in the process.
- Review your site, have your team workers review the site, make any final edits.
- Announce your site to the world!
- Maintain your site with regular updates.