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web development considerations
[Historic... only "useful" or "interesting" links remain.]
If you want a web presence, consider how much time you can devote to learning the relevant skills and to updating the site. There are a wide range of possibilities:
- initially challenging - A full personal and/or course web sites hosted by your university. Your institution may have templates that are easy to fill in, upload, and update. Or you can learn how to use a web design program like Dreamweaver to create a custom site. The latter can be quite rewarding, though time consuming until you are comfortable with the program. Once learned, web publishing is in many ways easier to use to create and update information than printed documents created with Microsoft Word - and you can save a few trees. Learn more about Dreamweaver here.
- easy -
- blogs (web logs) may provide enough of a web presence to suit your needs. Read more about blogs here.
- if you are a Macintosh user, iLife software let you create websites (and blogs) using iWeb software. Integrates easily with a .Mac (now iCloud) account, and with other servers with some effort.
- fairly easy - free group sites like Yahoo! Groups provide many integrated web tools that are fairly easy to learn. The price you pay is the advertising on your site and group email message. Read more about free web sites here.
- challenging in a different way - a web site hosted by a commercial web host or free web site provide. Often these free and commercial sites have web site templates that you can customize. However, web templates can be somewhat challenging if you do not understand the basics of web design. Even if you do, their templates might not offer the flexibility you might desire. In most cases, you will want to purchase your own domain name.
- Read more about free web site options here.
downloading web sites for offline browsing
You can bring a copy of your web site to a presentation on a CD, in case the Internet connection fails.
You can also download a web site for offline browsing with Internet Explorer.
- on a Macintosh with I.E. 5.2 - File menu --> Save As: Select Web Archive. Click th options button to select whether to download images, sounds, movies, and the number of levels to download, and whether or not skip links to other sites.
- on a PC with I.E. 6.0 for Windows - File menu --> Save as: Select either Web Page Complete, Web Archive (single file) or Web Page (HTML only)
finding content
copyright-free graphic, sound, and video resources for your web site
- Internet Archive - Internet Archive's WayBack Machine holds 10 billion web pages archived dating back to 1996. The Prelinger Archives contains over 48,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films.
- Library of Congress - especially for researchers. See the Minerva Web Preservation Project of digital primary source materials.