How To Make Your Own Web Pages

These instructions are primarily intended for Linguistics faculty, students, visitors and staff. If you're not in any of these categories, you can follow them anyway, but don't email us about your web page, we don't need to know :-)

Basically, you need to

  1. Create your home page. Recent versions of Netscape include an editor that you can use to create web pages without really knowing HTML, and these instructions should make it fairly painless.
  2. Test your page by using Netscape to access it from a Mac or from any machine other than babel. If you can't view your page at all, it probably means that your files have access permissions that make them unreadable to anyone but yourself; use the UNIX command chmod to fix them (you'll need to ask for assistance if you don't know about chmod).
  3. Send email to nrh@ling.upenn.edutelling us where the web page is, so we can put links to it from the department's pages.
Hopefully you know how to use Netscape and email by now, so you're two-thirds done already!

More hints on the Netscape editor

These hints deal with some of the subtle points of using the Netscape editor. Before reading them, you should probably look at the step-by-step directions given in the link Create your home page, above.

How to make your papers available for downloading

This topic is covered on its own page, q.v.

Learning HTML

Eventually, you'll have to bite the bullet and read up on HTML.

I still don't know of a really good nutshell introduction for the impatient non-technical reader, but there are some that try. (Note: This section is way out of date!! I've removed some dead links, but no new resources have been added since, oh, the Civil War.)

  • WebCom's Publishing on the Web site (especially their Introduction to HTML). It won't quite walk you through what you need to know, but it's a start.

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  • The HTML Goodies Primer. Billed as "a seven day, plain English, description of HTML". The HTML Goodies home page also contains many extremely readable special-subject tutorials.


    • Here are some more documents that ought to be of help:

  • HTML Quick Reference. Relatively brief, and worth browsing to get some idea of what goes where and why.

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  • Everyone is providing links to the NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML, but personally I think it's guaranteed to try your patience. Read it if you plan to go into the Web-authoring business.

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  • A Beginner's Guide to URLs is a very comprehensible, but incomplete and rather dated introduction.

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  • Some Frequently Asked Questions on writing HTML documents, by Thomas Boutell.

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  • Frames: An Introduction explains how to use frames, which divide web pages into multiple, scrollable regions. (For advanced users).


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    alexis@ling.upenn.edu