Community Toolbox

HTML Resource Guide for EZ/EC Communities

Creating community home pages and posting them on the Web is one of the primary purposes of the EZ/EC WWW server. Since we are not born with the knowledge necessary to build Web documents, we thought it would be helpful to build a guide that points to resources and tools that can help you build your Web pages.

The Basics: HTML Editors

HTML stands for Hyper-Text Markup Language. It is HTML that makes web documents look the way they do. It accomplishes this by setting "tags" within the text, which then tells the browser (what you use to view Web pages) how to format the document.

<h5>Sample Paragraph</h5>
<p>The <i>quick</i> brown fox jumped over the lazy <b>dog</b></p>

Here's what the same paragraph looks like displayed properly.

Sample Paragraph

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

For those who have used the original versions of Wordstar, HTML should look familiar. The most important thing to keep in mind is that in order for text to appear in special formats such as bold, centered, or in tables, it needs to be surrounded by tags. You should also keep in mind that some tags cannot be placed within other tags because doing so would violate the rules of HTML coding. Some editors may allow you to break the rules, but you then run of risk of not having your document appear properly in all browsers.

Here is an example. HTML rules state you cannot insert a paragraph tag <p>. . .</p> within a header (title) <h1> . . .</h1> tag because paragraphs and headers are designed for different layout purposes. Some editors do not allow you to make such mistakes. Our recommendation is that you use those editors to create your pages. It may be a bit more trouble, but you can be assured that your pages will be read properly by all browsers.

HTML Authoring Guides

There are a lot of guides out there that can help teach you how to write HTML documents. Below are links to a few of them that can help get you started.

NOTE: These sites will also help you with inserting graphics, tables, making a background color of a graphic transparent and creating clickable images (ISMAPS).

HTML Editors

Suffice it to say that you will need a program to create and edit HTML files. Below is a link to several indices of HTML editors.

Using Existing Word Processing Files

You can use existing word processing files and convert them to HTML. Many of the major word processing, such as Novell and Microsoft, and desktop publishing programs have released versions that will convert files for you. Be aware that the HTML these programs create may not conform to published standards. The following links will provide you an up-to-date list of HTML conversion resources.

Graphics

Graphics can add a lot to your web sight. While they make the pages more appealing visually, they can also add a long wait for those who are connecting to your site with a 14.4 or slower modem or through one of the many on-line services. Here are a few tips for incorporating graphics.

  1. Keep images as small as possible: Do not use full-page graphics. A full screen is somewhere around 640x480 pixels and a full color image that size could take as much as 500K of space and may take as long as 5 minutes to load and view. Please keep in mind that people are paying for accessing the Internet and large graphic files literally cost them time and money. If you do insist on using large graphics, you should do two things:
    • Indicate the size of the file in kilobytes, e.g., (500k)
    • Provide a non-graphical method of accessing the same page (text-based)
  2. Use small color palettes: A color palette is a list of the colors that are being used in a given image. The higher the number of colors, the more memory the file will use. For example, the icon on the right, when demo icon saved with a 256-color palette, requires 2,256 bytes of memory. The same icon saved in a 16-color palette needs only 257 bytes. Smaller files mean faster page load times.
  3. Use Alternate Names: HTML permits you to assign text to a graphic that, for some reason, may not be visible to the user. Reasons could include the misnaming or mislocating of a graphic, or the user may be using a non-graphical text-based browser such as Lynx. This is especially important if you use the graphics as a navigational button. Assigning the alternate text consists of adding the command ALT="text" command to the <IMG SRC> tag.

Graphics FAQ

FAQ sheet on Internet Graphics (57k)

Access Counters

Everyone wants to know how many people have visited your site or a specific Web page. Looking around you will see lots of different types of access counters ranging from graphics that look like automobile odometers to regular numbers. Here are some sources for page counters.

Registering Your Site

Once you have your site established and your pages on-line, you need to tell the world that you exist. One way to do it would be to hunt down all of the different directories and list with them individually. Another way is to go to one page that helps you register with the main directories (which is what we did). Here is the one we used:

wURLd Presence

Setting Up A Web Server

Setting up a web server to handle your own content _can_ be a rewarding experience. The Web provides you an opportunity to highlight your community in a manner that is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You can use it do distribute economic development reports, promotional materials, and much more. We believe the Web will become one of the primary tools for communication in the near future.

Setting up servers can also be expensive. Start-up costs for hardware and software can easily reach $4,000 to $15,000. There are very good servers available for free (see the links below) and are the basis for a large majority of the Web sites currently available. Charges for space on an existing machine can range from $30 to $100s per month, depending on the level of service and design costs. There will also be expenses for labor, maintenance, and document management. Communities thinking about setting up a service ought to contact a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) to obtain rate information before setting up their own service.

NOTE: Empowerment Zone and Enterprise Community designees and Champion Communities may setup web sites on the www.ezec.gov server at no charge. If you represent one of these communities, please send a message to webmaster@ezec.gov requesting more information.

The following links provide some useful information on setting up Web servers.

Web Server Comparison Reports
Free Web Server Software (Unix-based)
Web Server Information Sources

REMINDER: Refer to the HTML Authoring Guides for detailed instructions on how to write HTML documents

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