Web Publishing

Atarex Communications is committed to making web publishing accessible and secure to our clients. We strongly endorse WebDAV to maintain a web site. If you have special needs for security, workflow approval, revision control, or legacy web publishing options, please contact us.

Recommended Guidlines:

• File names for web pages and materials:
1. Always use lowercase, do not use UPPERCASE to name your files. This is for consistency and for easy to type URLs.
2. Do not use spaces or punctuation like !, &, or (parenthesis). Use _ or - (dashes and underscores) instead.
• Good Example: contact_us.html
• Bad Examples: Contact US.htm, picture #2.JPG
3. Always name your files with a reasonable and intelligable description, do not rely solely on letters or numbers for labeling.
• Good Example: sunset_at_beach.jpg
• Bad Examples: img2a.gif, 2.png
• Directories and Folders:
1. Use directories to organize all of your web site materials into proper folders to collect materials. This organization prevents file clutter and makes maintenance easy to parts of the web site.
2. Keep all the images in a subfolder below the pages in a "media" or "images" subfolder.
3. Use the file name guildlines above to name your folders.
• URLs:
1. Use relative URLs whenever possible for stylesheets, images, and anchor links.
• Good Example: ./media/filename.gif
• Bad Example: http://www.your.domain/media/filename.gif
2. Conversely, do not use fully qualified URLs for your web site materials unless they are for external URLs.
• Publishing with HTML Web Page Tools:
1. If there is a setting, use it to preserve the current HTML. Try not to alter or reformat the HTML, if possible, so that the original code remains intact.
2. Do not publish images and stylesheets redundantly! You might make extra copies, break links, waste disk space, and slow your publishing time.
3. If you need to upload a lot of images, move files, create folders, or do any other "file maintenance" versus "page updates", use a WebDAV tool to work on web site, not a HTML page tool.
• Keep a safety net, always! Use production values.
1. Make a backup on the server, save changes locally and test them.
2. Upload your update in parallel, test them on the server, then deploy.
3. Remove old copies everywhere when done to prevent any confusion with a stale version of a page.
• HTML:
1. Pages ending in .shtml, .php, .pl, or .cgi are server processed pages and should not be directly edited from the web. Seek technical help.
2. Web pages should always end in .html, not .htm.
3. Make your anchors first, then hyperlink to them! :~)
4. Use web page templates when creating for new pages.

Production Values

Atarex recommends that you follow these directions for web publishing, they will let you recover from any mistake.

1. Find the existing document or template on the web server by browsing through web folders or by using your web browser.
• There are lots of tricks for isolating the URL: view frame/link in new window, show only this frame, etc.
• Consider creating a safety net, backup copy, parallel folder, etc.
2. Download a copy to your computer, save it to your hard drive.
• Consider transforming it to a parallel name now by doing a rename or Save As...new name.
3. Load the local copy into your web page editor, make your changes, and save it to the hard drive.
• If you haven't done so yet, consider transforming it to a parallel name now by doing a rename or Save As....new name.
• Repeat making changes, you can preview changes in the browser by viewing the local copy of the file on your hard drive.
• Save the final version, ready for publishing.
4. Web publish/upload the copy to the web server.
• Verify that your work got up to the server properly, browse the new URL on the server with your web browser.
• If all goes well as expected, rename the orignal file to document-original.html
• Rename document2.html to document.html
• Verify that your changes have taken place (by reloading the page at the original URL: document.html) Beware that sometimes a web browser might aggressively keep a cached copy of the page in memory rather than go back to the web server to get a fresh copy. Learn about Shift+Reload!
5. Clean up!
• If all goes well, delete the document-original.html on the web server.
• Delete your local copies on the hard drive: now there are no extraneous copies around, so there is nothing stale that could possible confuse anyone.

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