ARCHIVED MATERIAL

A Webpage Tutorial

Create Your Page

Log in to your math account on one of the department computers, open a terminal window.
Follow these instructions from our computing staff. Don't skip the chmod part, if you want your page to be publicly accessible.
Your webpage will be visible at www.math.ucdavis.edu/~mathusername

Editing the Webpage

As it stands, your web page is just a generic placeholder. You need to edit the file index.html to make it into a real web page. The main principle at work is: whatever file you cook up and save as index.html in your public_html directory, that's what will appear when anyone looks you up on the web.

There are two main options for customizing your webpage:

Option 1: Make it yourself.

The internet is graced by a billion website design tutorials. At the time of writing, Mozilla's documentation is perhaps the best of them.

Option 2: Use a third-party

Another good option is to use some website-hosting application and just have your math URL redirect users. Some good options include

Google Sites
WordPress
Blogger
Or search online for “free website”

To redirect www.math.ucdavis.edu/~yourusername to your real website, the index.html file in public_html should be the file

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<!-- HTML meta URL redirect -->
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://my.real.website.com/">
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Good Practices

A good website is an accessible one. Some ways to promote accessibility are pretty intuitive, e.g.

Avoid text content in images.
Don't have flashing elements.
Avoid relying solely on color to distinguish elements.

Other aspects of accessibility would be pretty hard to guess if you weren't familiar with the situation. e.g.

Don't use HTML tables to layout your website.
Use <p> </p> tags instead of </br> ones to break up lines.
Include meaningful alt-text descriptions for your images.

See Mozilla's Accessibility Guide for many practical tutorials and guidelines on this topic.

For more general computer help, e-mail IT help@math.ucdavis.edu