Pagemill Basics:
The following information has grown out of an overwhelming interest in "webbing", i.e. creating web pages and the fact that many of you received brand new iMacs which were bundled with Adobe's Pagemill. I offer these hints for you Mac folks on how to "do the basics without really trying". If you weren't lucky enough to get a new iMac, sorry. If you did get one and you don't figure out how to do this, you're really missing out. This site will also probably always be under construction.
PageMill allows you to create HTML documents without understanding HTML at all. Just try it. Open a PageMill document and type just like you would on a word processor. Now, highlight some words and click on the buttons up top and figure out what they do. You can change alignment, style, font . . . make thing bold, italic, or underlined. You know, all the regular stuff. The other most important button is the one that looks like a mini-spreadsheet. It makes tables which allows you some formatting options.
Now, just because I said you could change some of that stuff doesn't mean that you ought to. One of the limitations of Pagemill is the fact that you don't have tabs, and since fonts vary so widely from machine to machine, you should just stick to the default font. It just translates the best on other computers using different browsers. Also, sometimes, "what you see is not what you get". After you create a "web page" in PageMill, you want to save it, and then drop it on your browser's icon and see how it will actually look online.
The one key piece of knowledge is this: How to make a link: you have to underline the words that you want to be "clickable" . . . then put your cursor in the bottom bar where it says "Link To:" and type the URL or the name of another page there. This is key to organizing information in a logical manner.
You also need to know about the Inspector and Color Panel. This is how you change the colors of backgrounds and text. Using tables is the only real way to do any formatting . . . drop and drag is the name of the game and pick up column guides and move them around.
One more thing . . . your manuals are inside the Pagemill folder on your hard drive and it will be a pdf file. You need Acrobat Reader (acquire it from Adobe) to open it, then print the manual and you will have it all.
If you really want to understand this, go to this PageMill Tutorial and work through it. This is an excellent, comprehensive, and easy to understand primer for Pagemill from a Mac training company in Australia called MacAdvice. Another great Pagmill Tutorial can be found at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Instructional Technology Group's page. On the Web with Pagemill, HTML Editing with Pagemill, and Adobe's own Tips and Techniques offer still more resources.
For more general information, check out: Web Page Creation for Educators.
So lets say you actually figure out how to create a web site on your own computer (that's really what you do), how to you get your web site where everybody else in the universe can see and use it? You need an IP address & password from Mitchell and a shareware program called Fetch. Once you figured out how to get your website onto the district server, you have to go to Yahoo, Excite, and all the other browsers in the universe and submit it for inclusion in their lists. It doesn't happen automatically. In other words, just because you create a web site, doesn't mean that anyone will know its there unless you tell them. That includes Web66, ADE and the RSD's webmaster. You'll find a submit your site or submit your URL option everywhere.
There's so many resources on how to do this stuff. Just get online and look for it. You will find anything and everything on the internet. Ask and you can find out. It's true . . . lets use it to create digital classrooms, interactive collaborative online learning, etc., etc., etc. There's so much we can do with this technology, catch the VISION!
For web questions email: DebStaires@yahoo.com
General Webbing Help: