Department of Engineering

IT Services

Producing material for the WWW

This page is primarily about producing material for the World Wide Web. Other pages deal with Advanced WWW production, Web servers at CUED

WWW Page Production

Your choices are to use your current word processing package, use a specialised HTML editor or write Raw HTML. Converting old documents might require extra programs. WWW Graphics production shouldn't pose a problem.

Guides and Tutorials

Validation

Remember to check the resulting files. Look at it with various browsers (IE, mozilla/netscape and a text-only browser like lynx). You'll need to proofread your documents online - don't depend solely on print-outs!

You can also run automated checkers

Note also that the Disability Discrimination Act, which came into force on 1 October 1999, has made it a legal requirement that information (including that publicly available on the Web) should be accessible to disabled people. A page of information is available online from Cambridge Universiry. The APU's Web Accessibility Guidelines are useful too.

Utilities on the CUED Teaching System

xfig produce gif files. gimp produces animated gif files.

Getting your files onto the WWW

  • Where to put the files - The Engineering Department run various servers. Our main central ones are
    • www.eng.cam.ac.uk - departmental and administrative pages. Also staff's official "home" pages.
    • www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk - help on computing
    • www-g.eng.cam.ac.uk - research group pages
    • www2.eng.cam.ac.uk - users' files.
    Only www2 is available to all CUED members as a place to add files to the WWW - the notes for Undergraduates gives details on what to do.
  • What to write - If you are authoring official information for the CUED Web site you should consider
    • what are you trying to get across and to whom?
    • are you duplicating information that already exists elsewhere on the Web (in or outside Cambridge) and could be linked to?
    • is this information sufficiently sensitive that it should either be restricted to University network users or CUED's internal network?
    • how often will the information need updating and do you have time to do this? It will by your responsibility to maintain the currency and accuracy of the information on your pages.
    • will you need to create on-screen forms for users to complete, or display information from databases?
    • where will the pages be served from.
    • will the pages conform to the Department's rules.
    You might get some ideas for information to include by seeing what other Universities are doing. The next step is to check your proposals with your Web Strategy Committee representative.
  • How to create pages -

Controlling, monitoring and increasing access

  • How to control access to pages - There are various ways to control access to pages
    • PIN protection (CUED only)
    • Raven protection (CUED only)
    • password protection
    • domain-based protection. Files can be made available only to certain domains (like eng.cam.ac.uk). To control access to a directory of pages so that only CUED people have access, create a file called .htaccess in the directory, make it readable by everyone, and put the following into it 
      order deny,allow 
deny from all 
allow from .eng.cam.ac.uk
      You can have a list of "allow" lines.
    Adding 
        <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,noarchive">
    in the HEAD of your document hints to search engines that you don't want the file indexed.

    If you're dealing with sensitive information you might benefit from having your files put in the www Unix group. This offers further security options. Mail webadmin for details.

  • Monitoring and increasing access -

See the Advanced WWW production page for more details (on counters, etc).

Security, Guidelines and the Law

Publications and Organisations

Contacts and Further Information

  • People - webadmin oversees the Teaching System's World Wide Web material.