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Designing A Personal Website

Website Template

To jumpstart making your website, Sarah has made available a template. The code for Alex's website, which may be useful as well, is also available.

Useful Programs for managing your website

• Dreamweaver - Not free. Adobe software to edit your site using a graphical interface (GUI). Allows editing HTML, PHP, and CSS pages (among others).
• WinSCP - Free software. Useful for uploading to your site. Also has a "sync" feature that can allow you to sync a particular folder with your website. Also allows changing file permissions on your site. NOTE: WinSCP is Windows only. CyberDuck is potentially an alternative for OS X.
• SFTP - Useful for uploading pages to your site. Alternative to WinSCP.
• SSH - Free software. Useful for more complicated tasks like changing file permissions on your website, and editing and running PHP code. The open-source version of SSH is PuTTY.
• GVim - Free software. An overly complicated, somewhat sadistic text editor. BUT very fast and easy to use once you get the hang of it. Highly recommended by Sarah and Alex if you have far too much time on your hands.
• Useful Firefox extensions:
  • Accessibility Evaluation Toolbar
  • Juicy Studio Accessibility Tool
  • Web Developer Toolbar
  • Fangs Screen Reader Emulator
  • Firebug

Tracking Visitors to Your Website: Google Analytics

Google offers a free service Google Analytics to track visitors to your website. To get listed, you will need to paste a section of code into the HTML of your website. Go to the above address to sign up, and from there you will be able to copy and paste the required code into your website.

Get Your Site Listed on Google

Google Webmaster Tools allow you to see any errors that Google encountered when they last indexed your site. To use the free tool, you will need to upload a special file (provided whens you sign up). This tool also allows you to list your site with Google if they have not found it already.

Assigning a Password to Your Website

If you want to password protect a portion of your website, the easiest thing to do is to password protect an entire folder. Once you do this, all files within that folder can be accessed only after entering a password. See http://rohan.sdsu.edu/~zvoleff/GEOG101 for an example. Setting up a password is most easily done using SSH, and a ".htaccess" file. Let us know if you are interested in doing this, as we can show you how.

Other Resources

• See http://access.sdsu.edu for the university guidelines for website accessibility.
• The Rohan Guide to Making a Website has instructions specific to making a website on the Rohan server.

Making a Wiki

There are many free wiki scripts floating around the internet. One that is fairly easy to setup and use, and that doesn't require a database, is PmWiki. This is the software being used to run this wiki.

Adding an Image Gallery

If you want to add an image gallery to your site, there are many ways of doing so. The simplest is to add a series of tables containing your images. For something more complicated, the Simple Picture Gallery Manager (SPGM) is one easy way to set up an image gallery without worrying about having a database. See http://rohan.sdsu.edu/~zvoleff/photo_gallery for an example. See the above (Attach:public_html_zvoleff.zip) for the code behind this gallery.

Useful PHP Scripts and Templates

There are several other convenient things you can do in PHP if you are interested. If you are interested in any of these possibilities, talk to Alex and he will be happy to go through them with you. Several possibilities are:

• Automatically tagging pages with the date they were last modified.
• Setting up a special set of folders on your site to provide an automatic listing of files (such as lectures, quizzes, etc.) See http://rohan.sdsu.edu/~zvoleff/GEOG101 for an example (the login is "GEOG101" and the password is "solstice"). All the listings on this page are dynamically generated using PHP - you don't need to directly edit the code to add new files.
• Setting up a system of templates in PHP to simplify adding new pages to your website.