Creating a Simple Web Site

Created for DH 500 by Geoffrey Rockwell

In this exercise you will create a simple web site and put it up on the web.

We need to do three things:

1. Find a hosting service on the web where we can put our web site. This could be a university server, or a commercial service. In our case we will use a free service called Neocities.
2. Then we need to create a web page or two. We can do that using a AI tool or straight in HTML. (We could even do it in XML with a CSS stylesheet.)
3. Finally we need to upload the web page to the server.

Finding a Hosting Service

There are all sorts of places that host web sites. Some possibilities:

• The university runs servers for research and learning. Through the university you have access to Google Sites (https://sites.google.com/) where you can build and maintain a site.
• GitHub provides web site support, but it is complicated to use.
• Commercial services that cost from $7 and up provide server space.
• Web design services like Wix (wix.com) that let you design a site for free using a drag and drop interface, but charge you for upgrades and special features.
• Simple free services like neocities.org.

We are going to use Neocities. If you have a preferred server use that. Go to https://neocities.org and create a free account. Go to the Dashboard and explore the simple index.html document they have for you and the other documents.

Creating a Web Page

Now create a simple web page for yourself or for some project. There are different ways you can do this:

• You can edit the HTML of the index.html page or create a new web page (*.html page). Neocities has learning materials. The W3Schools have a good step-by-step HTML tutorial. See https://w3schools.com/html/default.asp
• You can create a document in Microsoft Word (or your favorite word processor) and ask an AI tool to convert it to HTML with prompt like this: "Convert the uploaded document to HTML. Keep the HTML code simple. Don't use CSS." Note, you may have to iterate to get it to do the page right.
• There are all sorts of online or local applications that can let you do WYSIWYG editing of web pages.

For the moment try working with the raw HTML.

Uploading Your HTML to the Site

Once you have the web page you need to upload it to the web site so that everyone else can see it. With Neocities you just drag the .html page into the area on the Dashboard with the files. If you asked an AI tool like Gemini to create the HTML then you can copy the code and paste it into.

Going Further

Here are some things to try:

• If you let an AI create the HTML you should try editing it live. Neocities lets you edit the HTML pages right on the site.
• Try creating a second page (or uploading one) and then linking it to your index.html page.
• Try creating a simple HTML page on your computer and then uploading it to your Neocities account. (Can you figure out what your Neocities account location is?)
• Try experimenting with the .css file to change the look of your web pages.
• Can you upload an XML file with CSS to Neocities so that it is on the web?