Creating a Page for All American

The following step-by-step instructions will help you set up a page for All American: Literature, History, and Culture, a World Wide Web site I edit and manage on the UNCP server.  If your project meets my standard criteria for content, clarity, style, and integrity, I will consider it for publication on All American, where people all over the world will be able to use it to do research on American literature, history, and culture.
  1. Visit my template for All American pages.  As you follow the remaining steps in these instructions, visit this template from time to time and make sure that your page looks like the template.
  2. Launch Netscape Composer.
  3. To create a red box at the top, click on "Table" in the toolbar at the top of the screen. In the dialogue box that appears, change the number of columns to 1, the border line width to 0, the cell spacing to 2, and the cell spacing to 4. Click on the gray box next to the word "Color"; in the pop-up menu that appears, click on the bright red box in the second column, third row. Click on "OK."
  4. Before you do anything else, you should go ahead and save your page.  Plug a diskette in the disk drive.  Click on "Save" in the toolbar at the top of the screen.  In the dialogue box that appears, choose "3 1/2 Floppy (A:)" so that you will save your page on your diskette.  Choose a name that has 8 or fewer letters and refers to your subject.  Then type a period and "htm" and click on "Save."  Examples: family.htm, law.htm, slavery.htm
  5. To create the white area and narrow beige box, place your cursor below the red box and press "Enter." Now click on "Table." This time, leave the number of columns at 2, but still change the border line width to 0, the cell spacing to 2, and the cell spacing to 4. Choose "Left" under "Horizontal Alignment" and "Top" under "Vertical Alignment." Click "OK." You should see two boxes; each of these boxes is a cell. Click in the cell on the left so that the cursor is blinking there. Place your arrow over this cell and click with the right mouse button. In the pop-up menu that appears, click on "Table Properties." In the dialogue box that appears, make sure that the tab labeled "Cell" is highlighted. Change the cell width to 30 percent. Click on the gray box next to "Color" and choose the lightest shade of yellow, which appears in the first row, fourth column. Click "OK." Now you should see a narrow beige box on the left and a wide white box on the right.
  6. To fill in these boxes with text, simply click inside them and type. In the red box, type the name of the time period you are covering in your Web page: "Colonial America, 1607-1783" or "Antebellum and Civil War America, 1784-1865" or "Postbellum America, 1866-1913" or "Modern America, 1914-present." To change the color of this text to white, highlight it and click on the arrow on the right of the small black box in the toolbar next to the bold "A." In the pop-up menu that appears, click on the white box. While the text is still highlighted, click on the icon at the far right of the lowest toolbar at the top of the screen. In the pop-up menu that appears, click on the icon in the center.
  7. To fill in the beige box with text, click inside this box and type the appropriate information.  Use the template as a guide.  To choose a text style, such as "Heading 3" or "list item," highlight the appropriate words and then find the box on the far left side in the bottom toolbar at the top of your screen.  Click on the down arrow and select the appropriate text style.
  8. To fill in the white box with text, click inside this box or tab from the beige box.  Again, use the template as a guide.
  9. For help with aspects of basic Web design and publication--setting up links, for example, or publishing a page--see "Web Page Construction."