• HTML Tools
• HTML Best Practice

A variety of tools can be used to create and publish your web site. If you know HTML, you can create the pages on the site using a simple text editor, and publish the site on the "People" server. Creating a site this way, and transferring it to "People," can be tedious. Most people prefer using a "what you see is what you get" or WYSIWG program like Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage 2003. These programs make it easy to create, organize and publish a web site in its entirety. These programs literally write HTML code for you.

Now computer programs cannot accommodate every possible need; they can hide details and be inflexible in the kind of pages they create. They also are not available on every computer.

If you need to make simple changes quickly, you can edit the files created with FrontPage or Dreamweaver with simple text editing programs like Microsoft Notepad or SimpleText on the Macintosh.

In fact, you can create your whole web site using simple text editing programs and file transfer programs if you like. This method offers you the greatest control over your web site, but it can be tedious to create every facet and feature of your site manually. This is very much like computer programming, which is not for everyone.

If you use BlackBoard frequently, and just want to add a web page to one or move course sites, you can create a simple web page using the "rich text editor" (also known as an "RTF editing tool") built-in to BlackBoard. There is a similar rich text editor built into Typo3, the content management system used to maintain "official" university web sites.