Web Publishing/Design - Week 2

This week we started learning how to publish our own websites and learned how to update our home page. We learned about the editors and transfer clients needed to publish information on our personal sites. We focused on NVU and Home directory. Once we learned about these tools, we put them into practice and were able to open up our websites in class to use these tools. I had never heard of NVU, and think it will be extremely useful. It seems very user-friendly.
We talked about the network and some language that we will need to be more aware of, including http, html, and URL. We learned the parts of a URL so that we will know the specific paths we are taking to pull up documents online.
We learned about protocol, including how to name our sites and documents, which extensions should be used (html, htm), and that the extensions used really do matter. If we use an incorrect extension label, others will not be able to successfully pull up our websites. For this reason, we need to be careful not to use capital letters, spaces, or symbols other than letters and numbers.
We also talked about web design, and learned what we should and should not do to make our websites more user-friendly and visually attractive. The four basic design principles to keep in mind are alignment, proximity, contrast, and repetition. One big theme I took from this was to make sure there is continuity within our site.

I think that these concepts are great to know and can be easily applied to the classroom once we are teaching. It would be a good idea to have a class webpage that can be given to both students and parents. As teachers, we can put assignments and schedules online. Parents would then be aware of what we are doing in class, and students can check their assignments and other class information online. For the use of parents, it would be a good idea to link the site to a school website or other useful links. For students, it would be a good place to store other resources they may want to use in completing assignments.
Depending on the age of students we work with, a website could also be a good tool for the students to create jointly in class. They could save and load class projects, especially those activities done in groups onto the website. A good example might be a group science project. They can take pictures of projects, write up explanations and hypotheses, and load them onto their websites. The students would then all have access to their projects outside of the classroom. Often, if a group project is done, the teacher or one of the students in the group might have much of the information. If the information is shared online, the students could access the information from home to complete other assignments, or even show them off to their parents.

The one question I do still have is how would we be able to create a website like the ones we are working on outside of UVA. We are currently using home directory to store our public files. As we saw in class, if a picture is put on the website directly from another area of our computer, but is not actually stored in our public file on home directory, the image does not load when the site is opened. This makes sense to me, but is there something like a home directory we can use once we leave UVA? Or is there another way to produce websites that others can view?