Frequently Asked Questions
If your site is personal in nature, you need to create your Web space via our Account Command Center Web area.
If you are looking to create a new departmental Web site, you can request your new site via our Site Request form.
For more step-by-step instructions, please see our Web Services home page.
For daily maintenance of personal pages or those on the USD Web site, we generally recommend Adobe Contribute software. It is user friendly and works well for text updates as well as other content inserting, modifying, or deleting tasks.
Adobe applications are availabe for usage in the Serra 156A Macintosh and S156B Windows computer labs.
Limited copies of Adobe software (Contribute) are available through ITS for working on a departmental Web site at the university. A departmental Web site is considered your area's or department's official Web site. Personal sites or employee pages, even those done on behalf of the department, are not eligible. Distribution is limited to two (2) copies per department for maintenance on a departmental Web site only. For all other uses, it is the responsibility of the student or employee to puchase software which can be done through our online order form. Please note that you will need a POETS code from your department in order to complete the transaction.
Limited copies of Adobe software (Contribute or Dreamweaver) are available through ITS for working on a departmental Web site at the university. A departmental Web site is considered your area's or department's official Web site. Personal sites or employee pages, even those done on behalf of the department, are not eligible. Distribution is limited to two (2) copies per department for maintenance on a departmental Web site only.
For all other uses, it is the responsibility of the student or employee to puchase software which can be done through our online order form. Please note that you will need a POETS code from your department in order to complete the transaction.
You can also use Contribute or Dreamweaver software in many of our Computing Labs on campus. Check our specialized software list to see where these applications are installed.
Web development courses are available through the ITS Tutorials program.
For personal site maintenance, you'll want to attend the Intro to Dreamweaver 2-day course for learning all the basics on that application.
For departmental site maintenance, you'll need to attend either Dreamweaver for Departments or Contribute for Departments depending on the software application you have installed (or have requested) for your office workstation.
Other general courses include Dreamweaver Tips and Tricks, Dreamweaver CSS Development, and Building Web Forms.
If you want to be able to link to a particular section of your Web page from either the top of the page, or another Web page within your site, you can do this by inserting an anchor and then linking to that anchor.
- To create an anchor, place your cursor where you want the anchor to be and then from the “Insert” menu at the top of your Contribute screen, select “Section Anchor”.
- Name your anchor in a way that somehow reflects the section of the page that you are creating an anchor for, without be too long. Rather than a space, use an underscore (_) between words, and please keep everything in lowercase.
- To create a link to an anchor on your Web page, highlight the text that you want to link to the anchor, then select “Link” from the text editing toolbar.
- Enter the URL (Web address) of the page that you want to link to in the URL field.
- At the bottom of the link options box, there is a “section anchor” option. This is where you will fill in the name of the anchor. If you have already published the page with the anchor on it, then the name of the anchor may appear as one of the options in the drop-down menu for you.
- Click “Okay” and the link to your anchor will be active.
When you want to direct people to a section of your Web page that you have already created an anchor for, provide them with the URL of the Web page, followed by a pound sign (#) and then the name of the anchor.
An example of an anchor in action is http://www.sandiego.edu/law/news/webcasts/index.php#rakove. In this example, the anchor is called “rakove” and it directs users to the section of the page with the webcast from Jack Rakove’s lecture.
Unless you know that name of the anchor on the external page that you would like to link to, this process will require to you look at HTML code. If you know the name of the anchor, you can simply create a link to the URL of the Web page, followed by a pound sign (#) and then the name of the anchor. If you don’t know the name of the anchor (or if one exists), you can find out by following these steps:
- Go to the external Web page in your browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, etc.).
- In Internet Explorer: From the Page menu, select View Source. In Safari: From the View menu, select View Source. In Firefox: From the View menu, select Page Source. This will bring up the generated HTML for the Web page for you to search.
- You can then search the source code for either <a name= (which is how anchors are indicated in HTML) to see if there are any on the page, or you can search for the wording on the page that is where you want to link, to see if there is an <a name= HTML tag anywhere in the vicinity.
- The name of the anchor will be between the double-quotes after <a name = . For example, for an anchor tag like <a name=”testing”>, you would want to add #testing to the end of the URL for the Web page to link to that section of the page.
If you want to create a new section of your website that will have the flexibility to have its own navigation, etc., you can do so by adding a new folder to your website through the File Manager (http://www.sandiego.edu/unet/files.php) by following these steps:
- Click on “Departmental File Manager”.
- Log in with your departmental Web account username and password (this is not the same as your MySanDiego username and password).
- Click on “Sites”. This will take you to a list of all websites that are set up for your Web account.
- Click on the website that you want to add a section to and this will take you to a list of all files that have been uploaded to that website. This is also where you can come if you ever need to delete any files, or rename files that you have uploaded to your site.
- You can create a folder at the top or bottom of the page by entering the folder name and then clicking on “Create Folder”.
The folder name should be representative of what kind of information you’ll be putting in this part of your site. Folder names should be all lowercase, with an underscore (_) between words, rather than a space. - You have now created a folder that will house the new section of your website, but it is empty, so you will need to copy a subnav.xml file over from one of your other folders so that you can control the navigation in this new section of your website. Navigate in the File Manager to another section/folder of your website that has a subnav.xml file.
- You will need to download the subnav.xml file so that you can then upload it to your new folder. To download, simply click on the black arrow to the right of the filename.
- Now navigate back to your new folder.
- At the bottom of the screen, you can then upload the subnav.xml file.
- You have now created a new section of your website, complete with a subnav.xml file to control the left-hand navigation. However, you will need to go to Contribute and create a new page in this section of the site before anything will appear online.
Contribute gives you this message when you go to a subnav.xml file because it can’t display this type of file within the Contribute browser. This type of file needs to be opened in an external editor (Notepad for PCs, TextEdit for Macs). Despite the fact that this “error message” displays when you navigate to a subnav.xml file, you should still be able to click on “Edit” in the upper left-hand corner and your subnav.xml file will open in one of the editors mentioned above. For step-by-step instructions on editing the subnav.xml file and setting up a default external editor, you can download the “Contribute for Departments” PDF (http://www.sandiego.edu/web/pdf/contribute_departments_2010.pdf). Information about editing a website’s navigation begins on page 19.
There are two common reasons for left-hand navigation not displaying on Web pages:
1. There is not a subnav.xml file (the file that controls left-hand navigation) in that section of your website. You can determine if this is the problem by going to the Web page in question in your browser (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, etc.) and then replacing the filename with subnav.xml. For example, if the page that you want to test is http://www.sandiego.edu/its/sample/index.php, you would replace index.php with subnav.xml. If you get an “Object not found!” or “Error 404” page, then there is not a subnav.xml file within that folder of your website and you will need to add/create one.
2. There is an error in your subnav.xml file. You can also check this by following the steps above. If there is an error in your subnav.xml file, you will see an error message. Internet Explorer will provide a more descriptive error message that will indicate what the problem is, while Safari and Firefox will provide the line number and column number of the error, which allows you to take a look at that line in your file to see if you can identify and rectify the problem.
Some of the most common errors are:
- </navigation> is missing at the end of the file. Your subnav.xml files should all start with <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE navigation [<!ENTITY class "tertnav"> <!ENTITY basePath "however you get to your website after http://www.sandiego.edu. For example, /its/"> ]> <navigation section="the name of your website. For example, its"> and end with </navigation>.
- One of the items in your navitem is not contained within double-quotes.
- The /> at the end of a navitem was accidentally deleted. Each navigation item in your subnav.xml file should start with <navitem id= and end with />.
If you need additional assistance with debugging an error in your subnav.xml file, you can send an e-mail to web@sandiego.edu.