DIS-COMP4039 – Databases, Interfaces & Software Design Principles
Exercise 7: Static HTML
This exercise is about creating a simple static web page. It is important that you
know how to do this before we start working on how to introduce dynamic features
(of various kinds) to websites and how these can be hooked up to a RDBMS
database backend.
Setting things up
You will need to have a public_html directory on mersey.cs.nott.ac.uk. This will be
your root web directory, and any files you put in here will appear on the URL
http://HOSTNAME.cs.nott.ac.uk/~[username]/
So if your username is “abcd12d”, and you put an HTML file called “mypage.html” in
your public_html directory on mersey, then it will appear on the web as:
http://mersey.cs.nott.ac.uk/~abcd12d/mypage.html
You may already have a public_html directory, or you may need to create it. There
are notes explaining how to do this which you must follow for public_html to be
available:
http://support.cs.nott.ac.uk/help/docs/webpages/static/
This should be mapped in some way to your Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD)
(probably as a drive), so you can use the Windows filesystem to manipulate your
files directly (although you may need to manipulate them via SSH login as per the
above instructions from time to time).
IMPORTANT. Your web pages will be available to anyone on the University network.
For security reasons, however, they will be blocked from outside the University.
However, you can access your web pages externally by using WVD to access your
virtual desktop remotely.
Instructions as to where to get WVD and how to configure it are available at:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/it-services/connect/working/virtual.aspx
Exercise
Create a simple web page. This could be, for example, a basic ‘about me’
biographical page, but it can be about anything whatsoever (that you feel
comfortable making available within the University).
Put this page into your public_html directory on mersey and test it on the web. You
can download an example page from Moodle which you can use as a starting point
(consisting of two files: lab-7-website-demo.html and lab-7-website-demo-
photo.jpeg).
You should ensure that you use the following features of HTML when doing this.
Look them up in the W3Schools Tutorial (http://www.w3schools.com/html) if
necessary.
• Headings (try at least H1, H2 and H3)
DIS-COMP4039 – Databases, Interfaces & Software Design Principles
• Paragraphs (P)
• Text Formatting (at least B, U and I)
• Links (A – use this to link to somewhere on the web)
• Images (IMG – e.g., an image file that you download from the web)
• Lists (UL, OL, LI)
• Tables (try at least TABLE, TR, TD)
You can also experiment with other tags e.g.:
• Div