Design Your Own with Robin Williams Webwww.ratz.com Page Macworld Expo • Boston • August 1997 Tidbits: An “Internet year” is figured to be about 2.5 months. Almost half of the people using the Internet are over 34 years old. Predictions say by 1999 there will be 160 million Internet users. A Forrester Research study showed that the current $500 million in sales on the Internet will become $6.6 billion by the year 2000. The “Year 2000” problem does not affect Macintoshes. Jon Winokur, noted author, told me, “Andy Warhol was wrong: In the future, everyone won’t be famous for fifteen minutes. But everyone will have their own web site.” Contents Know the Web! . 3 A Web Address (URL). 4 A Web Page Quiz . 5 Searching the Web . 7 Making a Web Site . 8 Naming your Files . 9 Saving and Titling Pages . 10 Graphics . 12 Graphic Specifications . 12 Posting your Site . 13 Telling the World . 14 Your Promo Package . 15 The Process: a checklist . 16 Signs of Amateur Design . 17 Signs of Good Design . 18 Know the Web! I. From the beginning A. What is the Internet anyway? B. What is the World Wide Web? C. America Online is not the Internet, nor is it the Web. D. What’s a modem and why do you need one? E. What’s a browser and why do you need one? F. What’s an ISP and why do you need one? G. To use the Internet, should you choose an online service (America Online, CompuServe, etc.), an ISP, or both? ™ Url II. The World Wide Web A. What are web pages? B. What is a web site and a home page? C. What are links? How do you know where a link will take you before you click on it? 1. Internal (local) 2. External (remote) 3. Anchors 4. E-mail D. Visual clues 1. Scroll bars (longer page) 2. Pointing hand, underline, different color, border around graphic (links) 3. Browser icon in upper right corner (searching for and loading page) 4. Loading bar (loading page) III. Web addresses A. What is a web address (URL)? B. What the address tells you C. How to enter an address IV. Customizing your browser A. Change the toolbar B. Change the typeface and type size C. Change the home page D. Turn off graphics; load individually; turn back on 3 A Web Address (URL) This www stands for World Wide Web, but it’s really just a convention; that is, www is This is the domain name. It tells you who not the part of the address that owns the site. For instance, you have means the file is a web page. perhaps seen apple.com, toyota.com, nfl.com, Some URLs do not have www in etc. You can buy a domain name for their address. yourself. I bought ratz.com. http://www.ratz.com/robin/hats.html This stands for hypertext transfer After the domain name, the rest of the protocol. Who cares. The important address is just a path telling the browser thing is that this part of the URL is where to find the page you need. For what tells you that the file you are instance, in this address, the browser finds looking for is a page on the World ratz.com, and the slash tells it to look Wide Web. Instead inside the ratz.com folder and find a folder of http://, in some URLs you might or directory called robin. Then the next see news://, ftp://, or other slash tells it to look inside that robin folder abbreviations. These refer to other and find the file called hats.html. (All web files that are not web pages. pages are “html” files.) The “com” part of the address gives you a clue as to the nature of the web site. “Com” stands for commercial, meaning it is a commercial web site. Below are some of the other abbreviations (called “top level” names) you will also find in all web addresses in the United States: .com commercial organizations (peachpit.com) .edu educational institutions (cornell.edu) .gov government organizations (nasa.gov) .mil military organizations (army.mil) .net network organizations (internic.net) .org organizations that don’t fit in any of the other categories, usually non-profits (santafecares.org) Because there are so many web sites, new top level names are being created. You will also start to see these: .nom nom personal pages .store businesses offering goods .firm firm or company .info informational sites .art art sites (louvre.art) .web web-related services Other countries have country codes in their domain names, so if you see something like jp in the domain name, you know the site is being “served” to you from Japan. Below is a list of several country codes. jp Japan au Australia ca Canada fr France de Germany mx Mexico ru Russia ch Switzerland us United States uk United Kingdom 4 (Circle the appropriate items on these web pages and fill in the A Web Page Quiz blanks.) This is the page Watch for comets in this icon. title. It means __________________ . This is the address of the web page. I can click here to The domain is find text on this _________________. page. This is a link. I can tell because it is This loading bar tells _________________ me and _____________________ ____________________. _______________. This link is a different color from the others. What does it mean? I know this link will take me to This scroll bar another web site because the indicates that _________________________ _________________ is different. ______________________. I can see the link address in the _______________________. 5 V. Finding what you want A. Search engines vs. directories; when to use which one B. How to use a directory (such as Yahoo) C. How to use a search engine (such as AltaVista or Excite) D. Speciality search engines E. Find the teaching pages (drill down through Yahoo’s Internet categories) VI. Keeping track of pages you like A. Netscape makes “Bookmarks,” Internet Explorer makes “Favorites.” B. To make a bookmark before you get to the page: press on the link (Mac) or click the right mouse button (PC). From the menu, choose “Make Bookmark for this link.” C. To save a bookmark to your Desktop: (Mac) press on the link and choose “Save this bookmark.” Save it to the Desktop. (PC) click the right mouse button, choose “Make Shortcut.” Or drag a bookmark icon from the Bookmark window onto the Desktop. D. To do all kinds of things with your bookmarks, open the Bookmarks Window from the Windows menu. Use the new Item menu to add folders, dividers, change the name of bookmarks, etc. Drag bookmarks into folders or new positions. Select and hit Delete or Backspace to remove bookmarks. VII. Printing pages A. Before you print, go to the Page Setup dialog box, from the File menu. Choose the options you want to print. B. Before you print, change the typeface to match your printer. 1. If you have a PostScript printer, use a PostScript font, something like Times 10 point or Garamond 10 point. 2. If you have a non-PostScript printer, use a TrueType font or (on a Mac) a city-named font, like Geneva or New York, 10 point. 3. If you don’t know TrueType from PostScript, don’t worry about it—your pages will print anyway. But you might want to at least change the size for printing, since we can read type on paper that is smaller than what we can read on screen. C. After you print, change the typeface and size back to screen reading. ™ Browser 6 Searching the Web These are the addresses for some of the most popular directories and search engines. The description that follows each address does not infer that that is the only thing the tool does—it just indicates one of its strengths. Yahoo www.yahoo.com (best used as directory to drill down, not to search for words) AltaVista www.altavista.digital.com (word search; searches web and newsgroups) Lycos www.lycos.com (good for simple searches on standard topics) WebCrawler www.webcrawler.com (not so fast, but good; click “Surf the Web Backwards” to find out who is linked to your site) InfoSeek www.infoseek.com (can search web, newsgroups, and FAQs, e-mail addresses, current news, company listings; can also ask questions of it, “Where was George Washington born?”) Excite www.excite.com (great for when you don’t know the exact term you need; is conceptual/finds related topics; can ask questions of it) HotBot www.hotbot.com (can find sites with specific technology, such as sites that use JavaScript or Shockwave) Open Text Index search.opentext.com (great for finding obscure topics) DejaNews www.dejanews.com (best for searching newsgroup postings) Electric Library www.elibrary.com (30 days free access, then a fee; search magazines, maps, over 2,000 books, more than 150 newspapers and newswires, radio and tv transcripts, and pictures) software www.shareware.com (shareware and freeware) www.dowload.com (more software) www.winsite.com (Windows software) Search.Com www.search.com (access to a wide variety of search services) Search.com from c|net has an incredible wealth of resources to offer. Go there (www.search.com) and click on any of the links in the left column to find more ways to search. These links lead you to search engines that specialize in particular information. It’s incredible. For finding people, either home addresses and phone numbers, businesses, e-mail addresses, personal home pages, government agencies, and more, click the People link.