Creating web pages

Any member of Southampton University with an iSolutions account may set up web pages provided they read and adhere to the guidelines governing the use of our facilities.

Please note the following:

iSolutions cannot provide assistance in the creation of personal web pages, we simply provide an environment for you. You will be responsible for the coding and content of your pages - but there are many resources on the World Wide Web to assist you.

The University runs a Content Management System (CMS), Interwoven TeamSite, to support the University's corporate web presence. This is the recommended and preferred method of creating official University web sites. Using the CMS supercedes the information on creating handcoded web pages discussed here and in related pages.

In most cases, web pages will belong to one of the following categories:

  • personal - about your interests, hobbies, coursework;
  • club or society - web sites belonging to clubs and societies based at the University of Southampton;
  • research - web sites used to informally publish information on research in progress, though increasingly we expect this to become integrated with the CMS generated corporate web site.

Writing web pages

Personal web pages are kept in your home filestore. Club, society or 'official' pages are normally held in the home filestore of a group account specially set up for that purpose.

If you know already know HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and/or PHP (our supported scripting language) or are willing to learn, you can create your pages 'by hand' using a simple text editor, Notepad or Wordpad, for example. Basic pages containing mostly text and just a few images are relatively straightforward to create by this method, and there are numerous guides, tutorials and references on the web to help you, three (of the many) tutorials available are Active Jump, Echo Echo and W3Schools (the University has no responsibility for the content of external sites).

If you want to use web authoring software, there are number of web authoring tools available on public workstations. It's still a good idea to have an understanding of HTML, even though many applications will write the HTML for you, as you may still want to alter the code created by a web authoring package by hand.

Note: Although Microsoft Frontpage is available through the Campus Agreement, iSolutions does not provide support for it.

If you want to include images in your web pages, we provide a range of graphics packages and scanners in public workstation areas.