GCSU Faculty Web Server User's Guide
Learn More About HTML
HTML stands for HyperText Mark-up Language. You mark-up or format text files with HTML tags so that they can be read over a network or locally on your computer by an Internet browser such as Mozilla Firefox, Netscape or Internet Explorer. Although many HTML Editors are available, creating HTML documents can be accomplished with any text editor.
Resources
If you want to work with HTML, you need to know what all the tags mean.
Bare Bones Guide to HTML lists every official HTML tag in common usage, plus Netscape and Microsoft extensions. Version 4.0 of the Guide is designed to conform to the HTML 4.0 specification. You can read the guide online or download and print it out.
NCSA (at UIUC) Beginner's Guide to HTML covers what HTML is as well as how to use it. It conforms to HTML 4.0 standards and has a printable version for your convenience.
Writing HTML: a tutorial for creating webpages is a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to cover all aspects of webpage creation. The easy to follow tutorials will take you step by step through the processing of writing your webpages and uploading them to a server. The site has not been updated in several months, but more updates are planned in the future.
Style and Substance
The style of a webpage isn't concerned simply with making the page look good. A good style will ensure your visitors can navigate easily throughout your site. They will be able to read all of your text and see all of your graphics. Most importantly, they will be able to easily gather all the information you wish to provide.
Web Style Guide, 2nd Ed., is an excellent place to learn about web style.
Color
Communicate with Color discusses the importance of color in webpages. Webpages are visual tools. If you do nothing to them, the pages are gray with black text. This does not normally help the visitor absorb the material you are presenting.
Visibone Color Lab will help you decide what colors look good on your pages. Suppose you were wondering if bright red and magenta would look good together? Visibone will let you test it on their pages before anyone sees it on yours.
Fonts
Specifying what font face will be used to display your text or headers on your webpage is one way to use fonts. Simply changing from a serif font, such as Times, to a sans-serif fonts such as Arial or Verdana, can give your webpage a completely different feel Look at these two examples-
Serif Sans-Serif
Bear in mind, that after you've found the right font face, font color, and font size for your page, it may all look very different on someone else's computer running a different web browser.
If you want to create your own graphics for your pages, you might find the fonts on your computer to be limiting. There are many websites that offer fonts. Some sites are commercial and you will have to pay for their fonts.
There are also lots of sites on the web offering free fonts. Some are font collections - the site owner has collected fonts made by others. Some are sites maintained by font designers offering their own fonts free to the public. Here are three sites to get you started. When taking a font from a collection site please remember to read any documentation that comes with the font.
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