| Ricci Street
< Gizmos, Inc. <
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To give you a sense of the big picture and where you and the MBA students fit in.
Please remember one thing: Ricci Street will be done by you, not to you.
You use the tools, but you aren't sure how it all works or fits together.
You have an Internet connection, a text processor such as Notepad, an email client, and a web browser, preferably the lastest version (6.2 for Netscape Navigator; 6.0 for Microsoft's Internet Explorer as of August 2002).
You create and print documents, send and receive email and attachments, and manage files on your hard drive.
You download files and save text and images off Web pages.
You use email, discussion forums, and instant messaging or chat rooms to communicate with students and colleagues.
Most of all, you have an attitude that will let you explore and discover. For example, you sometimes view the source code of a web page.
You are gaining command of your tools. You are learning to ...
make webs
| move files between
computers | use
graphics software
use style sheets | do some programming
manage your webs | use time-saving utilities
All the MBA graduates have most of these skills. Usually JavaScript is the last one they get.
It's called HTML - Hypertext Markup Language. The bad news is that you'll have to learn it. The good news is that all the markup tags fit on one short list and they're pretty intuitive: <P> stands for paragraph. <H1> stands for a first-level heading; <H2> for a second-level, etc.
Microsoft's FrontPage and similar editors can keep you from ever witnessing HTML, let alone actually getting your hands dirty with it.
Now that I know HTML very well, I still use FrontPage for quick ideas and rough drafts. I overcome its limitations by using style sheets and by cleaning up before I put a web page out in public.
FrontPage is also a good tool for learning HTML.
Learn more about HTML at the Toolkit's Webmaking section.
In geekspeak, it's called FTP - File Transfer Protocol - a protocol to transfer files.
You need to be able to move files from your PC to the web server. The biggest difference between your PC and a web server is that the server stays on 24 hours a day. I recommend WS_FTP or CuteFTP. They're a little geeky to set up the first time, but will soon become second-nature.
Learn more about FTP at the Toolkit's Webmaking section.
You
need to acquire, make, and alter both images such as this seesaw and graphical
elements such as 
.
I use Paint Shop Pro. Many people, especially those trained in the paper world, use PhotoShop. Office 2000 has PhotoDraw. You can go a long way with the Paint program that came with Windows. They all do basically the same thing. If you can use one, it won't take you long to adapt to another.
Learn more about graphics editors at the Toolkit's Business Media section.
Digital information is accompanied by meta-information, that is, information about the information. For example, in this sentence, we can separate the content from its place in the overall structure -- in a paragraph -- from its presentation, such as brown color, left-justified position, and san serif font.
Cascading Style Sheets are separate documents that contains presentation information. If I want to change the color on every page of this Workbench section, I have to change only one line on the style sheet named gizmos.css that all the Workbench pages share.
Learn more about style sheets at the Toolkit's Webmaking section.
Interactivity involves programming. Gasp! It's the P-word!
Let's soften it: some light programming. It's so light that it gets another name: scripting. JavaScript is the most commonly used.
Important | Don't confuse JavaScript with the Java programming language and its Java applets.
JavaScript, as the script part implies, will let the user and your web site interact. It's not the same as your being there, but it goes a long way.
Most people learn JavaScript by cutting and pasting the code from other web pages or from the many free script libraries on the Web. After awhile, it won't quite do what you want it to, so you'll start tweaking the code. Pretty soon, you'll be able to read the code. You can go a long, long way without writing code from scratch.
Designing a web is hard enough. After it has been used a while, you'll want to change things. In a theater, it would be going backstage. For an automobile, it would be opening the hood. To change the oil, the wiper fluid, or a tire, you don't have to be a physicist, an engineer, or an auto mechanic. For web sites, you'll find that doing some things yourself is faster and more accurate than relying on secretarial or technical support.
The Internet is full of nifty little tools, often free, that give you a friendly GUI (graphical user interface) to do things that are too exacting, repetitious, boring, geeky, or all of the above.
For example, who's visiting your webs? A lot of information is in the server's log files. A utility such as Analog (or a complex, expensive software package such as the ones marketed by WebTrends) will not only process the logs but give you a customizable interface to view them.
learn more: Toolkit's Webmaking section
You maintain a server.
You write programs in Perl.
You use the Web as a front end for a database.
If you can do all that, I'd be more than happy to share Ricci Street with you.
I've tried to keep this page brief, so some of the geekspeak may be confusing. You'll find that the Bistro is a good place to ask for translations and clarification.
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