Build a Better Edline page

To make a more user friendly Edline site you should follow basic Web Design principles – KISS

Using documents from Word, Publisher, and other programs require them to have the software or a viewer on their computer.  Even then might be version compatibility issues.

PDF files, created by “printing” with programs like CutePDF, can solve some problems but still require them to have the Acrobat Reader (free) installed.  And PDF files can be huge and can take a long time to load.

SOLUTION?  Use web html files.  Use Word to create your document and Save As web document to upload to Edline.  This works great when is just text.  Adding images adds steps to get done – more later.

BASIC HTML TIPS Only use Arial or Times New Roman fonts.
To keep page neat and consistent use Tables.  The first thing I do is create a “boundary” 1 x1 single cell table – see below.  For Edline I leave at 5 inches but could be dragged larger but do NOT exceed 7 inches or becomes too large to view completely on a normal Internal view and people do not like to scroll.

Then save your page as Web document – htm

NEVER LEAVE SPACES IN THE NAME as gets very ugly with extra strange characters in the browser. Use dashes – or underscore _ instead.

Now let us hide the table borders.  With the insertion point (blinking vertical line) in the cell, use the shortcut border tool as shown below and click on the No Border -  turns in gray and will not show on finished page or when printed.

Making Links.  select/highlight the text you what to use for a link and on the shortcut toolbar click Insert Hyperlink. 

OR just add text in Text to display in the popup seen below.  This will create the link wherever the insertion point is on the page.

You could link to another html page – be sure it is in and uploaded in same folder.

Or link to an Internet site.  TIP – use Internet Explorer to go to the site.  This verifies the site is there. Then copy the address from the browser address box to prevent typing errors and to be sure the needed http://.... is there properly.

WEB DESIGN TIP:  If you are linking to a site outside of your pages, when the viewer clicks they will exit your site and may not find your way home.  You can set this not to exit, but open a new browser window.  Click on the  button to open the Set Target Frame and select  New window from the drop down menu as seen to the left.

If you are going to have all Internet links and want to save some steps check the  so all future links will open new window.  Click OK.

Now if you are done with your image-FREE page, save as below.

File Name – NO SPACES

As type – Web page *.htm

Notice the top allows you to change the Page title (what shows at top of the browser) if you like.  Word defaults to the first part of the document text but you should check and modify if needed – special characters or punctuation can cause different title.

Upload to Edline.  Edit your Contents section. Click on Add and on the Create document page fill out the Summary Information you need. 

To upload the html file you saved, Go to Add Content part like at left. For your page without images, select    and browse to where you saved your file.

The result should be a Frames style page with your school Edline masthead at top like image below.

This was a Teacher resource links page that only visible to teachers in Edline.

But I want to add images to my page.

My page for student links under general Contents

This can be done but needs a few more steps.  Just insert or copy images to your Word web document.

However when you save and try to upload to Edline the same way the images will be missing.  This is due to  the way Word saves web pages. See on the left, the Xvid_fix.htm had no images so was just saved as a single file.  The Better_Edline.htm had images so Word creates the Better_Edline_files folder to create and save the images.  This folder and its contents also need to be uploaded.  To do this Edline needs a compressed ZIP file.

With Windows XP this is very easy. Multiple select the file and folder by holding down a Ctrl key and clicking on each – then right mouse click on one for the menu

Click on

And it creates a file named Better_Edline .zip

Note: if you edit the file again should delete the folder and especially the zip file before compressing again for an upload.

 If you are using Windows 2000 you will need to use a program like FreeZip to do this.

Now in Edline  use from the Add Content choices. And you get two more boxes.     

In Upload a Web Document browse to the folder and click the zip file to upload.  Be sure to include the Default starting page – here just the one htm page in the zip file. 

I suppose you could zip several pages together and have it start with one but I haven’t tried that yet.

Save and you should have a page like the student Internet links I have at start of this section.