a content guide for web site editors

Submitted by admin on Thu, 11/05/2009 - 12:50
WW2 Nose Art
  1. introduction
  2. rules

introduction

A handy set of rules to follow. Read and save yourself frustration.

rules

  1. Check your work. The content of the web server is your responsibility. The LIC support team make sure the web server runs properly, but are not responsible for anything within the web pages such as broken links and spelling mistakes.
  2. Name your homepage inderemote-access/x-windows-systeml. Microsoft products like to name the homepage default.htm.
  3. Don't create files with spaces in the names. Filenames containing spaces are a bad idea. Special characters such as spaces are replaced with code in URLs, which makes them look a little weird. Replace them with hyphens or underscores.
    eg. Someone copies the document release 14 May.pdf to the document root. This file appears in the URL as http://www.myserver.com/release%2014%20May.pdf. It looks less complicated after replacing the spaces with hyphens: http://www.myserver.com/release-14-May.pdf.
  4. Create files with lowercase names. Filenames that are not lowercase are a bad idea. Microsoft Windows hides the case of filenames from you. A document named CONTENT.HTM on the disk will be displayed as Content.htm in your file explorer. This does not matter to Windows, but is no good for Unix. Unix computers are case sensitive, so the three names CONTENT.HTM, Content.htm and content.htm will be treated as three different files. You may copy the file Content.htm to the document root, enter the URL http://my.website.com/Content.htm into your browser to check how it looks, only for the web server to return a "404: File not found" error.
  5. Don't delete the testpage.html file. Our load balancers look for a file in the document root called testpage.html. We create this file. Do not delete this file or our load balancers will assume the web server is broken and not use it.
  6. All documents dished out by the web servers are stored within the directory /opt/docroot/. There are subdirectories for each division of the organisation and each webserver eg. The accounts intranet documents are stored in /opt/docroot/accounts/intranet.enterprise.org/.
  7. If you use a search database on your website, avoid keeping documents in proprietary standards such as Microsoft Word files. Some search engines are not clever enough to read them.
  8. Ask us for DNS entries. We create DNS entries for production websites. We do not create DNS entries for websites in other environments. If you want one, make a special request.
  9. Use the IP address to view the site in your web browser.
  10. Edit your host file when looking at your website with an Ip address. You can persuade your web browser to use DNS for a web site by changing your local environment. You do this by disabling any proxy settings and editing your hosts file. Open a text editor such as notepad. Open the file c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and add a line like this: 
    10.2.0.181           http://www.dom01.com/