Policies, Guidelines and Resources
Before you attempt to customize web pages, be sure to read and understand the Web Page Policies and Guidelines for The University of Iowa, the College of Liberal Arts, and Mathematical Sciences.
Style and Design Guidelines
The web has a lot of information about web page design and style. See, for example:
Using Authoring Tools
Many web authoring tools are available that let you create web pages in a wysiwyg interface. The Computer Support Group (CSG) provides Nvu on managed Linux and Windows workstations.
Writing Your Own Pages
You can use a text editor to write your own web pages, using HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the language in which web documents are created. You may also want to learn about eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). There are many, many other languages and development platforms that you may want to learn about.
Overrides
You can modify some aspects of the way that the web server presents your pages to browsers. In the directory or folder that contains the pages you want to affect, create a text file name .htaccess. In the .htaccess file, you can include any of these kinds of directives:
-
Access Limitation
Allow, Deny and Order
Authorization ConfigurationAuthDBMGroupFile, AuthDBMUserFile, AuthGroupFile, AuthName, AuthDigestRealmSeed, AuthType, AuthUserFile, Require, etc.
File PresentationAddEncoding, AddLanguage, AddType, DefaultType, ErrorDocument, LanguagePriority, etc.
IndexingAddDescription, AddIcon, AddIconByEncoding, AddIconByType, DefaultIcon, DirectoryIndex, FancyIndexing, HeaderName, IndexIgnore, IndexOptions, ReadmeName, etc.
Once you have created your .htaccess file, you must set its permissions via the chmod command so that it is accessible to the web server:
chmod og+r ./.htaccess
For more information about overrides, see:
