GUIDELINES FOR SCHOOL WEB PAGES

Transcription

1 GUIDELINES FOR SCHOOL WEB PAGES Introduction Mountain Home Public School District School web pages are public documents welcoming the outside world to our school and linking our students and staff to outside sources of information. Guidelines are required in the construction of school web pages to make sure that information on the pages is appropriate. Our web pages should support the educational goals of the Mountain Home School District. In producing web pages, the following goals should be considered: 1. Introducing outside visitors to the school and its programs. 2. Sharing our students and schools successes. 3. Linking our users with good information resources. 4. Providing information to our community, parents and students. Requirements Mandatory 1. School Webmaster Any school setting up a home page shall have a school webmaster appointed by the principal. The school webmaster shall assist the principal of the school in ensuring that these guidelines are adhered to and that the content of the school web pages meets the principal s approval. The principal may serve as the webmaster if he/she wishes to do so. The school webmaster is the only person in the school authorized to upload files to the server. All school homepages will be located on the district web server. All school webmasters are required to let District Webmaster, Keith Alman, know when their pages are ready to be posted, or share any concerns and questions with him at School Home Page The school home page shall be located on the District Web Server. All school web pages from any school in the Mountain Home School District must conform to these guidelines. 3. Content of Web Pages The content of school web pages must be consistent with the educational goals of the Mountain Home School district and must be in compliance of the policies of the Mountain Home School Board.

2 4. Communication Links No web page content should allow people accessing the page to contact any student directly. Communication with respect to the content of any page must be directed either to the principal of the school or the school webmaster. School home pages must include a mailto: link to the school webmaster. 5. Advertisements School web pages may not contain any advertisements. However, they may contain small acknowledgments of school partnerships or sponsorships. Web pages may provide links to partner s or sponsors home pages. 6. External Links All links connecting to external sites must be approved by the school webmaster, and are subject to final approval by the technology coordinator and building principal. 7. Identification of Students For a student s name and/or picture and/or information about the student to appear on a school web page, the school must obtain parental permission. Schools should proceed with caution and sensitivity in this area. The exception to this is when the photo was taken in a publicly accessible place. If it was possible that any number of people could have seen a particular student at a public event, then permission is not required. An example of this would be a crowd shot at a football game. However, if the picture was taken in a classroom or in a small-group setting that was not necessarily public, permission should be obtained. As a general rule, any teacher that generates web photos containing children must obtain permission prior to publication on the web. Filenames for pages and images should be checked to ensure that student s names do not appear there, e.g. johndoe.jpg, joepaul.html. A copy of the proposed web page(s) could be sent home so that the parent can see exactly how the student s name, picture or information would be displayed and the parent could be requested to sign a permission form for his/her child s name and/or picture to appear in that form. As a general rule, do not display both a child s picture and name together. Either display an article with the name and no picture, or a picture with no identifying names. Group pictures may be displayed without names. However, if a parent requests that his child s picture be removed from the group, either the picture will be removed from the site, or the picture edited to remove the child from it.

3 Similarly, permission must be obtained from any staff member prior to displaying his/her photograph or information. 8. Personal Home Pages Personal home pages for students or staff members are not permitted. Students may create content pages under their instructor s supervision, but not personal pages about themselves. Any pages constructed by students must be previewed and approved by the school webmaster, Keith Alman (kalman@mtnhome.k12.ar.us). Staff members may create pages that are education oriented, and relate to the Mountain Home School District. Linking to a student s or staff member s personal page on an external site is not permitted. 9. Respecting Copyright Copyright must be respected. The author of the Web page must not use copyrighted materials without permission. 10. No Commercial Use of the Web Site The Mountain Home Public Schools Acceptable Use policy clearly states that there is to be no commercial use of the school s network. Style Guide: 1. Avoid Under Construction signs on a page. Construct the page before placing it on the Web. 2. The date of the last update to the page should be clearly identified for page viewers. You can use a footer for this. 3. Use Microsoft FrontPage or Microsoft Word to construct your pages. 4. Images should be displayed with width and height set. Large images should be avoided. 5. Pages should be checked for spelling and proofread before they are displayed. 6. Facilitate travel through your web pages. Provide hypertext links wherever possible. Always include a link from your school s home page back to the district home page. 7. The school website will use the Tahoma Font. Use 24 pt. for headlines, 14 pt. or 12 point on interior pages 8. The school website will use the theme Network Blitz for all pages that do not have a white background. 9. Use graphics and animations sparingly. No more than one animated graphic on a page.

4 The following is a sample letter to parents for web page use. Dear Parents/Guardians, Mountain Home Public Schools 1230 South Maple Mountain Home, AR As part of a class project, our faculty and/or students are developing and will be publishing web pages on the Internet. Publishing web pages is similar to publishing a newspaper with text and pictures. Just as anyone may pick up and read an article in a newspaper, anyone with access to a computer and the Internet may find and read our web pages. We have now developed proposed web page(s) and have attached a copy to this letter. Before displaying any of this material on the Internet, we are requesting your permission to include your child s name and/or picture in the manner indicated. School web pages are public documents welcoming the outside world to the school and providing information about the school. Guidelines for web pages have been established by the Mountain Home School District. The web pages must support the educational goals of the district and must be appropriate for anyone in the world to access. We hope that you will find the proposed web page(s) meet these criteria and will allow your child s name and/or picture to be included. Teacher s Signature I grant permission for s name/photograph/information to be published on the web page(s) on the Internet as attached. Parent s Signature I do not grant permission for s name/photograph/information to be published on the web page(s) on the Internet. Parent s Signature. Comments:

5 Creating Your Teacher Web Page Web Page Primer For those of you who are new to making web pages, it is important to understand that a single web "page" can be made up of several files. The actual web page will be named with a.htm or a.html at the end of the name. For example, you will save your main page (the first one your visitors see) with yourname.htm (example dmartin.htm or diannemartin.htm). Pictures and graphics will be named with either a.jpg or a.gif at the end of the name. If the main page has a photo of a teacher, the file might be named teacher.jpg. In order to view the web page, both of these files, yourname.htm and teacher.jpg, MUST be present. So every picture and graphic you place on a web page will be a separate file that will EACH have to be "uploaded" to the Internet, so be sure to send all pages, pictures or graphics when you are adding to or updating your site. With this in mind, create a folder to house all of the files for your web page. Make sure every time you save files that they are going to this folder! What to use to create a Web Page Although the purpose of this documentation is not to teach you how to use web editors, here are some tips. Microsoft Word Yes, you can actually create a web page right from Microsoft Word! It won't be very fancy, but it will get the job done. Type your text and place your graphics on your page. Under the File menu, select Save as HTML or Save as Webpage (depending on which version you use.) If this is your main page, name it yourname.htm or yourname.html. If it is another page, name it what you

6 want with the.htm or.html. If you are using Office XP and saving as a web page, it will do this for you automatically. Select the folder you want this page to go to. (Remember to always make sure your files are going in the folder you want them!) Click Save. You may receive a warning before you go on! Choose to continue with the Save. If you have placed clip art on the page, it will be saved as a.gif file and have a name like image08.gif The formatting, or layout of the page may not be what you had in mind! This is because web pages must follow different "rules" than word processors, so you may have a few weird things that happen! You can adjust them after the page is saved. Microsoft FrontPage This editor is popular, but poses some problems for beginning users. Therefore, for the purposes of this class, we will not use it. In short, this editor should only be used by someone who has had training on it and is relatively savvy about finding and uploading files. Important Tips Keep your pages simple. If you are new to web development, start with just a few pages and a few graphics until you become more familiar with how web pages operate.

7 USING TABLES IN YOUR WEB PAGE Typically web pages are formatted using tables. Tables provide the capability to format text and images more closely to the appearance of a printed page. The best way to make sure your copy, pictures and other information looks right on your web page is to insert it into a table. To make a table, first decide how many Columns (across the page) and Rows (down the page) you will be using. This can be an estimate, because you can always add or delete rows and columns later. To insert the table, place your insertion point at the place on the document where you want the table. From the menu at the top, choose Table, Insert, Table. Type in the number of rows and columns and click Ok. The table is inserted into your document. This is a table with 2 columns and two rows. The table will expand as you type in it. If you want to type a paragraph, you can choose 1 column and 1 row. This way you know your paragraph will be inside your margins. You can also merge 2 cells together if you want a heading centered over your rows. Insert the table, highlight the rows you want to merge, click on Table, Merge Cells And now you have a cell that goes all the way across your columns Center Heading Col. 1 Col. 2 Col. 3 If you will use tables in your web page, you will not have the problem of items appearing in places where you didn t intend them to be. Everything will be nice and neat and where you want it. Just insert your copy or pictures inside the cells of the table. You can either have your table show up on the screen, or you can hide it. To hide your table, click on the table. From the menu at the top, choose: Format, Borders and Shading, and choose none. You can also get creative with your borders and colors in the table here if you desire. You may want to experiment with this after class.

8 INSERTING HYPERLINKS INTO YOUR WEB PAGE Hyperlinks are a navigation mechanism that provides the capability to move from one section of a web page to another, to another web page, or to another web server. Hyperlinks that provide navigation within a web page are called internal links. Internal links are created with bookmarks and the hyperlinking tool in the insert menu. Hyperlinks that address other web pages or web sites are external links. External links to other web sites require an absolute address. An example of an absolute address is: To insert a hyperlink: First highlight the word or words where you want your hyperlink to appear. Then go to the menu bar and: 1. Choose Insert 2. Then choose Hyperlink. 3. An Insert Hyperlink dialog window will appear. 4. Your highlighted text will appear in the Text to Display box. 5. In the blank for address, type in the complete address (URL) of the web page or site you want to reference. The address must be entered correctly and in the correct format including the Then simply click OK. 6. Alternatively, you may select a web address from recently visited sites in the list window. TIPS: To use a picture as your hyperlink, the process is the same. Click to choose the picture, then follow the steps above. You can create an hyperlink by clicking on the button and entering an address. The bookmark feature allows you to link to specific areas on the same page. USING BOOKMARKS Inserting a bookmark within the same page: Inserting a bookmark will allow the user to link to other information within the same page. When you click on a topic at the beginning of the page, it takes you to the information which is included in this page/file.

9 1. Put the cursor at the beginning of a line where you want to create a bookmark, or select some text at the beginning of a line. 2. Open the Insert menu and choose Bookmark. 3. Type a name for the bookmark in the edit box (up to 30 characters). If you selected some text in step 1, this box already contains a name. 4. Click OK. 5. To insert the bookmark, Type in a name for the bookmark or highlight some text that refers to the bookmark. Open the Insert menu and choose Hyperlink. Click on Bookmark and choose the bookmark you want to go to. Click OK

10 INSERTING A PICTURE INTO YOUR WEB PAGE Put the insertion point at the place in the document where you want the picture. From the menu at the top, choose: Insert, Picture, From File. Browse to your picture and double click on the picture to insert it on your page. If the picture is too large or too small you can resize it. To resize: Click on the picture to select it. From the menu at the top, choose: Format, Picture Click to the tab that says SIZE Type in the size you want the picture. For example: Height 2 Width 3 Click ok. If the picture isn t the right size, you can continue experimenting with it until you get it the right size. If the Picture needs to be cropped or adjusted in any way other than size, you will need to open it in an image program, such as Microsoft Paint or Adobe Photoshop, fix it and then resave it. INSERTING CONTENT INTO YOUR WEB PAGE Content for you web page may be added: 1. Directly on your web page document. 2. Copied and pasted from another document. 3. Or may be inserted from a file. You may use the insert file method when all of the text is to be placed on a single page. To insert text or content from a file go to the menu bar and choose: 1. Position your cursor at the location where you want the text to begin. 2. Insert 3. File And select the file as displayed in the Insert File Dialog window.

11 SAVING YOUR WEBPAGE The end is near! Up to this point you have been creating your web pages in a proprietary Word document format. The content, images and graphics, and formatting are embedded in your Word documents. The next phase in our web development project is to save each of the document files in a web page or HTML format. It is important to note that Word will create web pages from document files that very closely represent the print format created in the document file but not always exactly. The "save as web page" step is the last step in the development process. When creating and editing your pages always save in a document format. These are your source files, e.g. your original work. These are easily edited and formatted. During the web page creation process you many have a number or graphic or image files in the same folder as your Word web page document files. It is recommended that you create a new folder and copy only the Word files that are to be converted to web pages to this new folder. Your folder name should be short yet descriptive. We have named your folder with your name on the server. Notice that there are no spaces in the folder name and they are all lower-case letters. There should not be any spaces in your page file names. You may use an underscore in place of a space. At this time you should rename your home or main page as yourname.doc. This will be the default page when accessing your web site. After converting the first Word document to a web page format you will notice that there is a new file and folder created. During the conversion process, Word will create the folder, append _files to your file name and contain all of the graphics included in your page as well as a text file called filelist.xml. The file list provides information to your web page about its related images and etc. This files folder with all its contents will be what we use to post your page to the website. Go to the menu bar Choose File Select Save as Web Page Specify the location to save as if necessary (your new folder) Your file now will be saved as a web page and displayed on your screen as a web page Close this document. Repeat the process for each succeeding page.