Authoring UNDSMHS Web Pages

Departments and individuals within the UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences can post their own homepages on the school's web server. Here are some pointers to get you started.

Writing HTML

Web pages are text files coded with HTML (HyperText Markup Language) tags. Here are some good guides/tutorials on the subject.

W3C Tutorials - Basic, Advanced, and an intro to Stylesheets
Web Design Group's HTML Help site - promotes the creation of non-browser
specific, non-resolution specific, creative and informative sites that are accessible
to all users worldwide. A little old, but still highly recommended.
Makoto Tsuchiya's Let's Learn to Write HTML page.
Notes on how Relative URLs simplify web pages.

When you create files to upload to the Med School's web server, please follow these guidelines:

HTML Pages should have filenames ending in ".htm" or ".html"
GIF Images should have filenames ending in ".gif"
JPEG Images should have filenames ending in ".jpg" or ".jpeg"
If you want your homepage to appear in one of the master lists of homepages, it should be named "index.htm", "index.html", "home.htm" or "home.html"

Once you have written your HTML files (and possibly uploaded them to a server), there are some handy services that will check them for you. You might want to try:

W3C HTML Validation Service
Web Design Group Validator (validates entire sites!)
Unipress WebLint

All will display a form where you enter the URL of your document, or paste some sample HTML. Their server then loads and checks your file, reporting back any errors it finds.

This page was run through the W3C Validator. There's a logo at the bottom of this page showing that it passed at one time, click it to see if it still passes.

If you'd like to control which version of HTML a validator checks your page against (there are several), you can specify a "doctype" that the top of your file. For example, to check your document against the older, but more common HTML 4.0 standard, as opposed to the newer and very strict XHTML 1.0 standard - add this at the beginning of your HTML document:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd">

If you check the source of this document, you'll see it at the very top, before the <html> tag.

More information about doctypes.

Putting Pages on the server

There are several methods for putting files on the med school web server.

If you're a staff/faculty member with an office in Med Science North, and are connected to the building's Local Area Network with a PC or Macintosh, contact Computer Services for help with connecting to your department's area of the shared web drive.
Departments outside Med Science North may request an FTP account to access your departments area of the shared web drive.
Individuals with mail accounts on medicine.nodak.edu can create a personal webpage folder by visiting http://medicine.nodak.edu/personal_webpages. Once a folder has been created, pages may be maintained using FTP. User-specific details about what server name and directory to use are given by the personal_webpages page after you've entered a valid userid and password. (if you've already created a personal webpage folder, it's harmless to re-enter your userid and password on the agreement page again if you want to see the setting details again).

Registering your homepage

If you want your personal homepage to show up in the Index of Personal Homepages, you need to register it using your e-mail account administration pages. Here is a quick How To.. on the subject.

Return to the UNDSMHS Homepage

Barry Pederson <barryp@medicine.nodak.edu>
Revised 2/20/2003