| Randy
M. Brooks, Ph.D. Director of the Writing Major My ACI Faculty Development Workshops |
ACI Faculty Development Workshop
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This is a demonstration workshop on how to add Bookmarks in Netscape Communicator, how to re-arrange and organize your bookmarks, how to save your bookmarks as a separate file, how to turn that file into an html web page, and how to prepare introductions and write annotations to the hypertext links to save a Guide to a Topic on the Web Page.
When you are browsing through the web in Netscape Communicator, you can "bookmark" favorite pages you want to return to later in that browsing sessions or the next day when you continue on the web. To "bookmark" a site, simply click on the BOOKMARK menu and select "ADD BOOKMARK" from the menu choices.
This will add a descriptive name of the web page to the existing list of bookmarks. If the web page name is too generic, you may want to immediately rename the bookmark. Search through the web on a topic of interest and bookmark several pages you might want to include for other people interested in that topic.
After you have bookmarked several pages of interest to you on a topic, you may begin to realize that the bookmarks are in the order of your search. This order serves as a record of where you have been, but it does not provide an easy organization for finding certain pages again. You will probably want to organize your bookmarks more carefully by categories or related topics. In order to do this, go to the WINDOW menu and select "BOOKMARKS" from the menu choices.
The bookmarks will open in a separate window. You can click on any bookmark and move it to another position to re-arrange the order of the bookmarks. Or you can delete a bookmark by selecting then choosing "CLEAR" from the EDIT menu.
You can add a folder to your bookmarks by choosing "INSERT FOLDER..." from the ITEM menu. You can also edit the name of bookmarks or folders by selecting it first then choosing "EDIT BOOKMARK" from the ITEM menu.
Organize your bookmarks into related groups and add folders or dividers if needed to create clusters of related bookmarks.
When you have finished gathering and organizing your bookmarks, you can save your bookmarks as a separate file. Go to the WINDOW menu and select "BOOKMARKS" from the menu. Then select "SAVE AS..." from the FILE menu. Be sure to name your bookmark file including the ".html" tag and save it to your own disk or hard drive. Don't put any spaces or unusual keyboard characters in your filename since we will be using it on the web.
Now you are ready to open the bookmarks file in a web page editor such as Pagemill or Netscape Composer. Use the "OPEN..." command in the FILE menu to open the file instead of double clicking on the file icon.
Soon as it is open, change the "Title" to your own description of your bookmarks guide to the web. The "Title" is the phrase that will become the bookmark of your page if someone bookmarks it in the future. In Pagemill this can be changed by clicking in the gray bar just above the working space of the editor.
Save your page again using the "SAVE AS" command and replace the original file. Now the html file is double-click-able in your web editor program.
One of the key principles of good web design is to prepare people for context before details, so add a title and introduction to your web page explaining that it is a guie to web sites related to your topic. Add headings and subtitles to your sections as needed. Experiment with and use the various paragraph style headings available in the web editor to establish your overall title and section headings. Write a welcome to the entire page and short overviews of each subsection.
In Pagemill this is done by clicking in a specific paragraph, then choosing the style format from the down triangle in the Paragraph box, or by choosing menu items under the FORMAT menu.
Another key principle of web design is to provide users with a forecast of what to expect when they click on links. A brief annotation of bookmark links will help them select which links to follow. So write a short annotation of each bookmark in your guide, so that users will know what to expect from each link.
You may have difficulty typing annotation immediately following a link in Pagemill, because the linked address will continue typing in blue, underlined text. To get out of the linked text, choose "REMOVE LINK" from the EDIT menu or type COMMAND-R on the Mac keyboard. Then you will be able to type without the continued linking.
After you have completed your annotations and titles, you can save your web page (again, be sure to include the ".html" tag at the end of your file name). Open Netscape and choose "OPEN FILE" in the FILE menu to check your page in the browser. Your page is ready to be sent or given to a server for placement on the web.