STC Washington, DC Chapter, Past Chapter Event

Society for Technical Communication

Washington, DC Chapter

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Presentation: "Home Pages and the World Wide Web"

Note: This presentation has not been updated since 1995. Some information may be outdated and some links may be no longer active.)

• Presentation
• Workshop

This page provides the overheads and additional pages in the handout used in a talk presented by Cynthia A. Lockley to the Washington, DC Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication on 12 December 1995. The subject is about technical issues associated with the creation and maintenance of home pages on the World Wide Web with an introduction to the basics of HTML, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. (This page was updated on 14 June 1996 to incorporate new information and update some Web links for a presentation to the ACE-NIPS on June 14 at the University of Maryland University College. That presentation also included a hands-on workshop) that provides experience with building your own home page using HTML and graphics. Note: All links going to other Web sites will open in another window if you have Javascript turned on. Otherwise, they will open in the current browser window.

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Presentation

Cover
Agenda
What is the World Wide Web?
Have you ever encountered the following on the Web? Fatal error 500 To understand this, you need to understand URLs, fatal errors, and forbidden entry
Why should you have a home page?
- Personal benefits and goals
  Example, my site:
  Cynthia's home page
- Work benefits and goals
  A good example of a corporate home page as done by the Apple Computer, Inc.
- Negative aspects
How do you create a home page?
Basic HTML tags
Design and human interface considerations
Balance pages with contrast and visual relief. Create visual and functional continuity in your site's organization, graphic design, and typography. A careful, systematic approach to page design can simplify navigation and reduce user errors.
Optimizing graphics
This is my favorite tool for picking colors for text, links, and backgrounds is the Color Picker II
Be sure to check how your pages look on several browsers and how they print out. Here is a a page with an image map and related links from the State of Maryland Web site (December 3, 1995) as seen and printed from the IBM WebExplorer browser (the information in the button selections doesn't print).

and here is the same page as seen in Netscape on a Macintosh computer and printed to the same printer (the information in the selections prints):

This problem was eliminated between the time that the page was first put on the Web (December 3, 1995) and now when the Maryland page was redesigned.
Web sites for tools and resources
Now that you have a home page, how do you put it on the Web?
You can try wishing for access such as this little girl:

from The New Yorker
How to find an Internet Service Provider (ISP)
- List of ISPs by Area Code
Design and human interface sites on the Web
Reading material: books and trade journals
Glossaries and computer virus information
Now that you have your home page up and running, you can take a rest

from The New Yorker
Questions and Answers