Weave your own web site: an essential tool, resource

If you?ve got the time, you can create your own web site for a course, or your psychology department.

By Bridget Murray
Monitor staff

If your psychology department or course doesn?t have a World Wide Web page, take heart. Building that web page yourself may be easier than you think.

Why bother with a web page? It?s becoming an essential tool for university programs and departments to promote their offerings on the Internet, say many educators. A growing number of psychology faculty also use web pages as resource troves and guidance centers for students in their courses.

Some professors even post bulletin boards or chat rooms to connect with their students outside of class?efforts that universities increasingly support (see article, page 38).

The building blocks

Building a web page takes time and patience, but the result is rewarding, says James Couch, PhD, who created a web page for James Madison University?s psychology department. He and others who have built their own pages agree on the basic process:

? Find a place to put it?Pinpoint a space for your site, says Richard Hudiburg, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of North Alabama in Florence (UNA). Before building his department?s web site, Hudiburg first asked administrators for a spot on the university?s server. At institutions where information technology staff decide the placement of new pages, faculty should first contact them, he says.

? Find out how your university can help you?Many universities are hiring technology support staff who run workshops on page building or help faculty as they try it themselves. Some universities also offer chat rooms or bulletin boards where experts give you advice on creating Internet sites.

? Investigate the tools you?ll need?You may want to learn Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)?the programming language that defines a web page?s structure. To learn about HTML, you can take an HTML course, visit an online HTML helper or buy an HTML guide from a local bookstore (see resources listed at right). Or you can skip HTML and jump directly to new web-page programs that automatically convert text into HTML for you. These include Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe PageMill, Claris Home Page or Netscape Communicator?s Composer.

In FrontPage (available for downloading at www.microsoft. com/frontpage/), you can produce several connected pages as you would in a word processor, and the program converts the text to HTML coding for you. Claris Home Page (available for downloading at www.clarishomepage. com/) and Adobe PageMill (up for trial at www.adobe.com/prodindex/pagemill/tryreg.html) allow similar web authoring. Netscape?s Composer software gives you a step-by-step guide to constructing a page?offering you various colors and graphics as you go. Find it at home.netscape.com/home/how-to-create-web-services.html.

? Determine your site?s content and format?If you don?t already know what shape your site will take, visit other departments? web sites to gather ideas. Most schools offer descriptions of academic degrees, courses, faculty members, research projects and special announcements or summer job opportunities. Be sure to enhance your text with photographs and other graphics. Many HTML guides and web-page software packages teach you the basics of adding photographs and graphics and direct you to such resources.

Most web pages also include hyperlinks, which point users to electronic journals and resources at other web sites. Some even include forms for questions about a department?s degree requirements and course offerings or e-mail links to faculty. Hudiburg says his site?s e-mail link has prompted numerous users to ask him about his research.

? Start basic and add as you go?In creating his web page, for example, Couch first set the basic foundations in FrontPage and has since added a faculty photo album to his department?s home page and an animated frog graphic to his statistics page.

? Update the page(s) regularly?Joseph Plaud, PhD, creator of the University of North Dakota (UND) psychology site, recommends that departments update their page at least every semester. Faculty members come and go, and courses change and resources grow and evolve, he says. (Plaud has himself left North Dakota for a job as director of clinical services at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, Mass. But he?s still helping UND regularly build and update its site.)

Psychology Department web sites to visit

Visit these World Wide Web pages to spark ideas of your own:

? The psychology department at the University of North Dakota?Grand Forks publicizes its degrees and courses and offers an e-mail link for visitors with questions: www.und.nodak.edu/dept/psychol/

? An introductory statistics course at James Madison University features homework assignments, lecture slides and grades: falcon.jmu.edu/~couchjv/

? James Madison University?s psychology department includes departmental job listings and photographs of faculty: www.jmu.edu/psyc/

? Dartmouth College gives undergraduates information on meetings and mentoring opportunities with the Dartmouth Undergraduate Psychology Association: www.dartmouth.edu/~dupa/index.html

Self-help for developing your own web page

Check out the following resources for building your own Internet site:

Book HTML Guides

? ?Creating Killer Web Sites, Second Edition? (Hayden Books, 1997).

? ?HTML: The Definitive Guide? (O?Reilly and Associates, 1997).

? ?HTML Sourcebook : A Complete Guide to HTML 3.2 and HTML Extensions? (John Wiley & Sons, 1997)

? ?Planning and Designing Effective Websites? (Course Technology, 1998).

? ?Teach Yourself Web Publishing With HTML 4 in 14 Days? (Sams, 1997).

Online HTML Guides

? A University of Illinois primer:
www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimerP1.html

? A crash course in HTML:
www.ziff.com/~eamonn/crashcourse.html

? The HTML Guru home page: members.aol.com/htmlguru

? A list of HTML tutorials: www.devry-phx.edu/ webresrc/webmstry/lrntutrl.htm

? Interactive tutorial for beginners: www.davesite.com/webstation/html/