CNMS 165: Website Production

Overview:

1. Class review exercise
2. Domain names and hosting
3. Setting up FTP
4. Overview of SEO
5. Tools for helping your site get indexed by search engines
6. Stopping web crawlers from accessing pages in your site
7. Collecting statistics about your site

Assignments and Studying for This Week:

• Final Project (due Thursday 5/10 by midnight)

Class Review Exercise

1. Download the In-Class Work: Website Template file.
2. Create a new site (Site > New Site) in Dreamweaver and open the HTML and CSS files.
3. See W3Schools for a list of JavaScript examples.
4. Add at least one JavaScript function to your page from the list above. Some good examples include:
   • Display a message when you click a button
   • Display different messages when clicking on buttons
   • Display the current date and time when clicking a button
   • Return a random number when you click a button
   • Convert Celcius to Fahrenheit
   • Display a running clock

Domain Names and Hosting

• Anatomy of domain names: subdomain.domain.topleveldomain (ex. www.google.com)
• Domains can have no spaces or underscores (dashes and numbers are fine)

Setting Up FTP in Filezilla

• We will practice this together in class using the following credentials:
  • Host: www.cnms165.webhostingforstudents.com
  • Username: cnms165-student@cnms165.webhostingforstudents.com
  • Password: CNMS165#spring2018
  • Public URL: http://cnms165.webhostingforstudents.com/spring2018/
• Instructions can be found in the "What is FTP and How Do I Use It?" PDF in this week's folder

Overview of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

• "white hat" vs. "black hat", SEO for users rather than engines
• Using <meta> content: title and description

Tools for helping your site get indexed

• Create a sitemap.xml file (here is an online creation tool).
• Submit the sitemap.xml file to various search engines (like Google and Bing).
• Use Google Webmaster Tools
• Make sure your page content is viewable without the stylesheet.
  • You can use Lynx or a Lynx emulator to see what your page would look like just as text.

How to stop parts of your site from being indexed by Web crawlers

• Use a robots.txt file

Collecting statistics about visitors to your site

• Use the statistics tracking that comes as part of your Web hosting
• Use a third-party solution such as Google Analytics