These instructions are not designed to teach you how to make web pages. The purpose of these instructions it to show you how to put web pages on the file server so that other people can see them. These instructions assume that you already have, or know how to make, web pages. On this server, you should call your home page index.html, or index.shtml if you are going to use server-side includes. If you are technically-minded, you way want to refer to the technical instructions in addition to this document.

These instructions are written for Windows users, since they are the majority in Pharmacy. These instructions can be adapted for Macintosh users; use your common sense.

Creating a place for your web pages is easy. There are two steps, which are:

1. You need to create a web directory in your home directory.
2. You then place web content in your web directory.

Let's look at those steps in a little more detail.

Creating a web folder

This is the easy step. In Windows Explorer, create a new folder in your U: drive, the one labeled as your-username on 'binder'. Name this folder www, in lower case. NOTE: this folder must be called www. Not "webpages", "www ", "My Web Pages", or anything else. www, in lower case. Also, your web folder must be located directly in your home directory, not inside any other folders.

To make a new folder, select your U: drive in the left-hand pane of Windows Explorer so that the contents of your home directory appear in the right-hand pane (If you have not used the system before, your home directory will be empty. This is normal.) Right-click in the open space in the right-hand pane and select 'New' and then 'Folder' from the menus that appear. (See Figure 2, below).


Figure 1 - Selecting your home directory

Figure 2 - Making a new folder

Figure 3 - Naming folder www

Placing web content

Technically, once you have created your web folder, you are on the web! The address of your website will be http://people.pharmacy.purdue.edu/~your-username/, and if you go to http://people.pharmacy.purdue.edu/, you should appear in the list, with the title of your main page listed as "Index of your-username". However, although you are on the web, you are not yet saying anything. Your website is blank. Create some web pages, and put them in your www directory. Now your website has content.

Some notes on creating web pages:

• Please don't ask us how to create web pages. Although we do like to help people, we don't have the time to teach everyone the very basics. Read. Try "HTML for dummies" as a starting point.
• Certain file names are special. In particular, you should create an index file for your web pages. The index file is the file that the webserver displays when people don't ask for any file in particular. The index file names on this system are index.html, index.htm and index.shtml, in that order. When someone goes to your website (http://people.pharmacy.purdue.edu/~your-username/), the webserver checks to see if you have a file in your www directory named index.html. If there a file named index.html, the webserver delivers that file to the person who asked to see your webpage. If there is not, the webserver then looks for index.htm and index.shtml. If one of these is found, it is delivered to the person asking to see your webpages. If none of these is found, the server creates a list of all the files and folders in your www folder and delivers that list to the person who asked for your web page, so that they can select the file(s) they want to see. This also applies to folders inside your www folder.

  The short version is that you should create an index.html file for your www folder and each of its subfolders. Note that the name index.html (or index.htm or index.shtml) must be in all lower case in order to work.