File Management

One nice thing about having a web site is that not only can you publish information, you can share pictures with and make files available to your visitors. To make images and documents available you must first upload them from your computer to the server. There are several things to consider when you start preparing files to upload to your server.

Smaller is better!

You need to keep the files you upload as small as possible. There are a couple of reasons for this.

  1. Not everyone has a broadband connection. Many people in Robertson County have dial-up as their only choice. That 3 MB file you upload in a few seconds may take someone else several minutes to download.
  2. You site has a file space quota. The default setting for all new web sites is 10 MB, though this can be increased if you find yourself running out of room.

Use the proper format

While you can upload any type of file to your site, you need to remember that people must have the software they need to open those files, so use a compatible format.

Images

Any pictures you want to use on your site should be in one of three formats:

  • JPEG -- This format is good for pictures you have taken with a digital camera.
  • GIF -- This format is good for clip art and cartoon style artwork.
  • PNG -- This format is the best of both JPEG and GIF, though you may have compatibility issues with older browsers.

It is suggested you resize your images before uploading them to your site. Shrinking high resolution images down to a maximum width of something like 550 pixels is a good rule-of-thumb.

Documents

You can make all sorts of documents available to you students and parents on your web site. We assume most of the documents you will post on your site will be made with one of the Microsoft Office applications. Please keep in mind that while Office is widely used, not everyone has a copy. You might want to consider converting a document to PDF before uploading it to your site. Here's how you can do this:

  • On a Mac simply print the document, but click the PDF button rather than the Print button in the print dialog box.
  • On Windows you need to install software to convert the file to a PDF. Two free utilities for this are PrinoPDF and PDFCreator. With one of these utilities in place you simply print your document and choose the utility as the printer instead of your actual printer.

Zipping Files

If you have several files that go together why not upload them to your server as a zipped archive. This will reduce the size of the files on the server, and allow the files to be downloaded as a group. The archive can be easily unzipped again once the files are downloaded. Here's how to do zip a group of files:

  1. Create a folder on your computer to contain all the files you want to put on your site.
  2. Drag all the files you want to archive into this folder.
  3. Create an archive of the folder.
    • On a Mac right click (Control-click) the folder and choose Create Archive of "[folder name]."
    • On Windows right click the folder and choose Send To > Compressed (zipped) Folder.
  4. Upload the zipped archive to your web site just like you would any other file.