How to get a personal website hosted at Wake Forest

Creating a website and having it hosted on the Wake Forest servers is supposed to be easy, according to the hard-to-find, poorly written documentation. The over-arching process isn't so bad, but as they say, the devil is in the details. I am writing this page in the hopes that it will help at least one person through this non-trivial process.

Step 1: Tell the university that you want to have a personal site. This is the easy part. The multipurpose User Preferences page is how you do it. Login using your WIN username and password. Halfway down the page you will see a radio button labeled "Create a Wake Forest Home Page". Select this button and press Continue. This should take you to a page which will say whether or not your request has been granted. It will also show your new web address, typically www.wfu.edu/~username.

Step 2: Create your content. This is rather self-explanatory. At this point I suggest using the Dreamweaver software already installed on your ThinkPad. All your content should be stored in the local directory C:\Userdata\HTML\www-home\ . The File tab on the right-hand side of Dreamweaver (assuming you haven't changed the look and feel of Dreamweaver) should show you the contents of the www-home folder. Check to make sure this is true.

Step 3: Upload settings. This is the part that is supposed to be really easy, since the University pre-loads Dreamweaver with the necessary FTP and Secure FTP settings. Except that's not true. In the aforementioned File tab in Dreamweaver, you should see a pull-down menu with options like "wfu (FTP)", "wfu (Secure FTP)" and "wfu (acflies) on campus". For general use, select "wfu (FTP)", then re-open the menu and select "Manage Sites...". This opens a small popup window with the names of all management options. Select "wfu (FTP)" and click the Edit button. A new window appears with two tabs; select the Basic tab.

The first screen asks for the name of your site (really the name of your connection method to the site), and should already display "wfu (FTP)". It also asks for the web address, which you should fill in using the address given to you at the end of Step 1. The next page asks about server-side technology, and you are the best person to address that issue. The third page offers two radio buttons, and you should select the "Edit local copy" option. This page will also ask for the location of your local files, and should already have C:\Userdata\HTML\www-home in the text box.

At this point you may receive a popup window warning that the file you have just selected is the same file used by the other connection options. This is okay, and the message can be ignored.

Page four (almost done!) is all about the connection method. The connection is FTP; the hostname is ftp.wfu.edu . Your FTP account is your WIN username. I suggest leaving the password blank; Dreamweaver will ask for your password when you upload files. The final page about checking in and out is best answered by you, the user.

Step 5: Upload your content. In the File tab, next to your connect type, you should see a second pulldown menu with four options. The only important options (for now) are "Local view", which shows your local directory, and "Remote view", which shows the files already hosted on the web server. In local view, select a file name, then click the Up Arrow near the top. This will upload your local file to the server. Other options can (and should) be explored, especially Refresh and Synchronize. Change to "Remote view" and you should see your recently uploaded files are indeed sitting on the server.

Step 6: What happened to my files?! When you open your favorite browser, don't be surprised if your files do not appear, or you see a 404 page, or any other similar problem. As best I can tell, the default action for newly uploaded pages is to hide them. Return to the User Preferences page, login, and this time click the radio button that says "Set permissions". Select Yes and submit. Within a few seconds, your new pages should be accessible. You may want to bookmark the User Preferences page for future, perhaps frequent, use.

Congratulations! You've done it! If this page has helped you in any sort of meaningful way, please use the Contact page and tell me about it. I'd love to see your new site!