Thank you to the parents who have volunteered to do classroom web pages! Here's some information on how to get your classroom pages on the Sterling website.
Classroom site design instructions:
The school has asked that NO PICTURES of children be on the classroom sites. Pictures of the classrooms, teachers, field trip locations and school grounds are fine, as long as they do not have the children in them. If you want to use pictures of kids, please use stock photos. This is to protect the children.
The school does not supply web authoring software. There are some free ones out there available for use by non-profits, so Sterling web pages can be designed with those. Some examples are:
AceHTML
BBEdit Lite (Macintosh)
Some good ones (but not cheap!) are Microsoft Frontpage, NetObjects Fusion, and Adobe Dreamweaver.
Classroom site upload instructions
Each classroom has a separate folder for their web pages. To connect, you need an FTP client. You have a myriad of options available, from DOS to Dreamweaver’s built in ftp. One caveat is that IE will *not* work.
If your web publishing software does not have a built in ftp client, I personally recommend Core FTP Lite. It’s free and powerful. You can download it at www.download.com/Core-FTP-Lite/3000-2160_4-10256215.html?tag=lst-0-16. It’s a drag and drop client and will keep your directory structure on upload.
Settings
FTP host: www.sterlingmontessori.org
Username: Classroom with no hyphen@sterlingmontessori.org (i.e. A-6 would be username a6@sterlingmontessori.org)
Password: Please email Support with the classroom number for the ftp password.
Your default directory upon connection will be exactly where you need to drop your web pages. There won’t be any chance of overwriting something from another classroom!
Please name your main page index.html as the links off of the main page only point to the directory so we need that default opening page name.
Robots.txt file
Search engines send out “spiders” to search for words in web pages. The robots.txt file tells these spiders which directories they are allowed to look in. Ours is set so that the classroom pages will not be searched, this protects the children by keeping their names off of search engines.
If anyone needs any additional assistance, please feel free to email Support.
Thanks, and happy coding!