Creating a Staff Home Page
The UW Staff Web Server (staff.washington.edu) is available for staff to publish work materials, research results, and other information pertaining to their UW jobs.
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 four steps to create a home page for your Web site.
- Activate Web Publishing
- Compose a Home Page
- Move Your Home Page to Your Web Directory
- Open Your Home Page
1. Activate Web Publishing
Web publishing is a service tied to your UW NetID and Homer account.
To activate Web publishing:
Make sure you have a UW NetID.
If you already have an "@u.washington.edu" email address, then you already have a UW NetID, so you can proceeed to "Activate necessary services" below.
If you don't have a UW NetID, you need to Get your UW NetID now, and then proceed with these instructions.
Activate necessary services.
There are two services that you must activate.
You can manage which services you have active on the Add or change services area of the Manage your UW NetID Resources page.
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:
Your Homer account will let you manage the files on your 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 your Homer account. Files placed into public_html will be immediately viewable on your Web site.
Note: Are you both a student and employed at UW? If you have both staff or faculty and student Web services enabled, then you will find public_html containing your staff or faculty Web files, and a new student_html directory containing your student Web files. Use the proper directory name accordingly when managing your Web files.
2. Compose a Home Page
You have three options for composing a home page:
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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.
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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.
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.
3. 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.4. 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 your UW NetID:
http://staff.washington.edu/youruwnetid/
Substitute youruwnetid appropriately.
Refer to the UW Web Server URL page for a complete reference of these URLs.
