Creating a Department Home Page

The UW Departments Web Server (depts.washington.edu) hosts Web pages for UW departments and other affiliated units. If you do not have your own departmental Web server and want to create a departmental home page, follow these guidelines and instructions.

Guidelines

Please consider two important points when constructing your publicly viewable Web page:

Accessibility for Everyone

In order to comply with UW policy and federal and state laws, UW Web pages should use designs allowing access by persons with disabilities. Our goal should be to implement information displays and systems that work effectively for all.
Departmental Guidelines

Check with your department to be sure you are following departmental guidelines for Web publishing.

Instructions

Follow these five steps to create a home page for your Web site.

Get a Supplemental Account
Activate Web Publishing
Compose a Home Page
Move Your Home Page to Your Web Directory
Open Your Home Page

1. Get a Supplemental Account

Using the UW Departments Web Server requires a supplemental account. Any UW faculty or staff member can request a supplemental account. If you already have a supplemental account, proceeed to "Activate Web Publishing" below.

Go to the Request other services area of the Manage your UW NetID Resource page.
Click the "Supplemental UW NetID" link.
Fill out the Supplemental Account Request Form and select Departmental as type of supplemental account.
Submit the form.

You will receive an email from help@u.washington.edu within a few days confirming your Supplemental Account request.

Note: although the official contact person assigned to a supplemental account must be UW faculty or staff, students can be registered as eligible users of a supplemental account and therefore help develop the Web pages.

2. Activate Web Publishing

Web publishing is a service tied to the accounts UW NetID and Homer account.

You can manage which services the account has active on the Add or change services area of the Manage your UW NetID Resources page. Make sure to log in with the Supplemental accounts UW NetID.

There are two services that you must activate.

1. The Web Publishing service:

On the "add or change services" page, you should see "Web Publishing" under the list of services that are turned on. If the service "Web Publishing" is not turned on, then you must activate it:

Find it in the list of services that are off
Check the "Turn on" checkbox beside it
Click the Continue button and follow the remaining instructions

2. The Homer Account service:

The Homer account will let you manage the files on the accounts Web site.

On the "Add or change services" page, you should see "Homer Account" in the list of services turned on. If the service "Homer Account" is not turned on, then you must activate it:

Find it in the list of services that are off
Check the "Turn on" checkbox beside it
Click the Continue button and follow the remaining instructions

Activating Web Publishing and the Homer services creates your Web directory called public_html on the Homer account. Files placed into public_html will be immediately viewable on the Web site.

3. Compose a Home Page

You have three options for composing a home page:

Use Catalyst's SimpleSite tool to quickly and easily compose and publish a home page and, if you want, set up and manage an entire Web site.
Use an HTML authoring tool to compose your home page. Most will write HTML for you while you control the look of your Web pages. Many will help you upload finished pages to your Web directory on Homer.
Write your Web pages by hand in HTML.

Note: if you compose your home page by hand or with an HTML authoring tool, save the file as index.html (or index.htm). This is the filename associated with the main page of your Web site.

4. Move Your Home Page to Your Web Directory

If you need to manually upload your home page to your Web directory, use a secure file transfer program, such as SSH Secure FTP (for Microsoft Windows) or Secure Fetch or Fugu (for Apple Macintosh). These programs are available for free in the UW Internet Connectivity Kit, UWICK.

You will find your Web directory (public_html) by connecting your file transfer program to homer.u.washington.edu.

You can read more about moving files to your Web directory.

5. Open Your Home Page

Once your home page is in your Web directory, you and others can view it by opening your home page address in a Web browser. The URL depends on the UW NetID of the account:

http://depts.washington.edu/youruwnetid/

Substitute youruwnetid appropriately.

Refer to the UW Web Server URL page for a complete reference of these URLs.