Tips on Producing a Home Page and Web Presentation for an Esprit Project
All Esprit projects, actions, working groups and networks are strongly encouraged to maintain a Web home page with the following minimum contents:
- A short project description providing an overview of the project, the partners, the objectives and the expected results. A suggested template is attached.
- A more detailed project description in the form of presentation slides. These slides should ideally be produced with commonly used software (such as PowerPoint®) and a viewer made available for the convenience of your audience.
Many projects will wish to move beyond this and develop more substantial Web server-based resources. In this case your project's home page should have links to all the computer-based artifacts created under the project contract. These would typically include:
- the programme of work (technical annex) for the project
- published papers and book chapters
- technical reports
- dissertations and theses
- bibliographies
- software and data sets
- images, animations and video clips
- audio segments
- interactive demonstrations, simulations
- talks, speeches and lectures
- progress reports and the final report.
You might also consider linking your pages to any maintained by members of your consortium.
- Project name, acronym and number (use HTML tag H1)
- Keywords: (use HTML character tag Emphasis)
- Objectives and Approach (use HTML tag H2 for this heading)
- Results
- Contact Point (with phone, fax, e-mail)
- Partner list (with links to partners' own home pages where available)
- Link to Esprit's home page.
All Web documents are created in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). There are three ways of creating HTML documents:
- convert an existing document - text-conversion tools are widely available
- produce directly in HTML via a tool/editor for use with a word-processing package
- work directly on "raw" HTML.
You may find that you need to use all these methods depending on the availability of existing documents and the type of material included. Most developers of Web resources find that the use of an HTML tool alongside a mainstream word-processing package is the most efficient method. There are also a number of validation tools available to help you check the syntax of the documents you have created. See the Resource Guide below for links to some useful pages.
Points to consider are:
- Users access the Web via a variety of computers and using many different browsers, though varieties of Mosaic™ and Netscape™ are most common at present. The same document will appear differently when viewed on each type of platform. Remember to allow for mono as well as colour screens and for access methods ranging from dedicated ISDN lines to slow dial-up modems.
- For the above reason, use large graphics sparingly. Small icons can greatly enliven a page.
- Retain high levels of screen design for the home page and for other key screens which present a project image.
- Structure new documents in small chunks and rework existing text documents on this basis.
- Ensure top-level or "front" documents are short, with any essential larger documents in the background.
- Give all documents meaningful titles.
- For maximum compatability between PC and UNIX systems, limit file and directory names to 8 characters, with up to 3 characters for filename extensions. By default, .htm for PCs and .html for UNIX systems are used as the filename extensions for HTML documents.
Managing your Web presentation
How documents are designed and produced is a major issue, but how they are managed will be of equal importance in projects making substantial use of the Web. Recognising and resourcing this needs to be a clearly defined task with an appropriate allocation of time and budget. You should consider:
- deciding who has ownership of the documents: author, organisation, project?
- ensuring that there is collective project responsibility for the Web resources
- giving one partner or individual overall responsibility for managing the Web site
- providing opportunities for recording accesses, feedback and comments from users
- maintaining alternative ways of distributing the documents, as the Web is more heavily used and accessible in some countries and sectors rather than others
- ensuring that there is an agreed procedure for monitoring, updating, reviewing, reporting and dealing with faults and responding to users
- agreeing a procedure for deleting and updating documents.
Notice: These links point to servers that, unless specifically indicated, are not under the European Commission's control. Please read the disclaimer before continuing.
- The World-Wide Web Consortium, W3C, maintains a comprehensive tools guide and a compendium of advice for authors, webmasters and system administrators.
- The list of Web-related frequently asked questions (with answers!) maintained by Thomas Boutell covers, amongst many other topics, authoring and server maintenance.
- The Macmillan HTML Workshop covers skills-levels from the complete beginner to the experienced Web author, and for a quick, no-nonsense tutorial on the fundamentals of HTML, see the National Center for Supercomputing Applications' Beginners Guide to HTML. Once you've mastered the basics, check out Composing Good HTML by Eric Tilton.
- Ken Jenks maintains pages covering recommended file formats for WWW documents and the variety of viewers available.
- Andrew King answers the question: "What makes a great Web site?"
- Thalia's guide for WWW providers contains many useful links to other sites and offers an enquiry service.
- Text can be greatly enhanced using icons, and Yahoo maintain a list of collections, libraries and archives.
- Yahoo also list various multimedia resources.
- Webmasters need a policy on handling WWW software agents - robots, wanderers and spiders.
- Some thoughts on producing finely crafted Web pages.
- The Web Style Manual maintained by Patrick J. Lynch of the Yale Center for Advanced Instructional Media.
- Microsoft's PowerPoint® viewer for .ppt format slide-show files.
- Microsoft's Video for Windows Runtime version 1.1e for .avi format videos. This is a 1.42 MB self-extracting file - run setup.exe once extracted.
- Microsoft's Word Viewer enables Word users to share their documents with people who do not use Microsoft Word for Windows®.
- Microsoft's Excel® Viewer for Windows 95®.
- Adobe Acrobat® Readers for viewing .pdf files.
Please note the disclaimer.
- Graham Outram offers "a friendly, efficient and competent service to anyone who, perhaps through lack of resources, needs assistance in describing their research and publishing it on the WWW".
Send in information about your service.
Acknowledgements
The first version of this document was based on section 5.5 of "A Guide to Project Style and Documentation" produced in July 1995 for DG XIII-C3 of the European Commission (Telematics Applications for Education and Training) by Cambridge Learning Systems Ltd (fax +44-1223-311-787), and drew on part 3 of "Research Priorities for the World-Wide Web", the Report of the NSF Workshop sponsored by the Information, Robotics and Intelligent Systems Division held in Arlington, VA on 31 October 1994. Thanks to the following for ideas, data and feedback: Anne O'Brien, Antoine Cavaciuti, Marc Fresko, Nick Cook, Pete Jones, Peter Wintlev-Jensen, Santiago Garrido and Tony Gore.
Disclaimer
The sites listed in this document, unless specifically indicated, are not under the control of the European Commission. For this reason, the Commission can make no representation concerning such sites to you; nor does the fact that the Commission has provided this listing serve as an endorsement or warranty by the Commission of any organisation or individual either maintaining or providing content for any of the sites listed, or of any services advertised through the medium of such a site. The Commission has not tested any software found on these sites and is not in a position to make any representation regarding the quality, safety or suitability of any software found on them or retrievable from them.
The URL for this page is /esprit/src/tips.htm
It was last updated on 10 December 1996, and is maintained by Steve.Rogers@dg3.cec.be
