Choosing a Web authoring tool

Selecting a software package is easy for some tasks. For example, standard tools have emerged as superior for editing a photograph or writing a book. By contrast, because the Web is relatively new, the choice is far from clear: there is no preeminent tool for Web site authoring. Complicating the decision is that you can approach a Web project in many ways. You can create your pages the old-fashioned way, writing your content and the HTML code that renders the page in the browser by hand using a basic text editor. You can use Web page design software, designing the pages and adding content, but letting the software generate the HTML. This second approach resembles working with page layout software, in which you position text and images and never need to look at the programming code that generates the printed page. Or, instead of creating your own Web pages, you can use a courseware system, which is a combination of tools designed specifically to deliver online instruction.

First find out what tools and options are available at your institution. Although it is important to choose software that suits you, choose whenever possible from those that your institution uses and will support for the foreseeable future. If you are collaborating on a project, try to select a tool that works for everyone involved.

Courseware systems

Computers have long been used to provide "systems" for accomplishing specific tasks or functions. An institution's central accounting system, for example, simplifies the tracking and maintenance of financial transactions. What makes an accounting system different from a spreadsheet program is that it performs a specific task - accounting - whereas a spreadsheet program, though it can be used as a tool for accounting, can also be used to keep track of birthdays or chart population growth or calculate an object's size and mass.

Until recently, most software written to facilitate the task of educating has been discipline-specific - for example, Mathematica for math and SPSS for statistics. There was no generalized "teaching" software, though many educators have written modules for teaching using such general-purpose tools as HyperCard and True Basic. With the advent of the Web and the increasing interest in online learning, education systems, or courseware, have emerged. Courseware provides a Web-based system for managing the transactions of teaching and learning. These systems support educators in the same way that accounting systems support budget planners and administrators, and they are becoming increasingly widespread in higher education.

Find out whether your institution uses a courseware system. Using courseware has many benefits, particularly if your goals are limited to the clerical aspects of administering a curriculum, such as grading, creating class lists, and distributing course information. These systems provide a suite of straightforward tools for administering a course, delivering instruction, and facilitating student interaction online. When a courseware approach is applied institution-wide, sites have a consistent look and feel, and students become accustomed to a particular way of working with course materials online.

You may find, however, that courseware is not a good match for your online instructional goals. Because courseware aims to be an all-purpose tool, some educators may find it too inflexible for the idiosyncratic practice of teaching. If your needs fit nicely into the program's supported paradigm, then a course site created using courseware will demand less time, effort, and proficiency than one created from scratch. But do not adopt the system hoping to coax it into a form that will better meet your teaching needs. You will spend more time and suffer greater frustration than if you had built the site from scratch.

If a courseware system is available at your institution, ask colleagues who are using the system what their goals are for online instruction and whether the courseware tool provides the functionality they need. Review sites that have been created using the tool and see if they support the online classroom you envision. Schedule a demonstration of the product with the computing support staff. Be sure to keep your long-term goals in mind when reviewing the product: What should your course site look like in three years? Will the program accommodate your vision?

Web authoring tools

If courseware is either unavailable or insufficient, explore the Web authoring software that your institution supplies and supports. There are two main types of software for creating Web sites: text editors and visual layout tools. With a text editor you write HTML in text mode and use a browser to preview the pages in a layout. A visual, or WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), layout tool lets you design pages in layout mode. With this tool you position text and images on the page, and the software generates the codes needed to display the page in a Web browser.

Review these different approaches and determine which best suits your working style. When choosing a tool, make support a high priority: don't use software that is not supported by your campus computing department.

Text editors

A Web page is simply text that is interpreted and displayed as a formatted page by the browser software. Developing a Web page requires no special software (a Web page can be written in SimpleText or Notepad), just a knowledge of the required HTML codes and correct syntax. Most people, however, aren't fluent in HTML - a complex and evolving markup language - so they need a tool that will simplify Web page creation. For this, they turn to an HTML text editor: basic text software that has been customized for Web authoring. It still requires you to work in text mode, but it provides tools to facilitate markup and verify syntax; selecting a block of text and applying formatting, for example, will insert the necessary tags. An HTML text editor is a good choice for people who are most comfortable working in text mode, understand the concept of "tagging" text, and want control over their HTML code.

Visual editors

Web page creation tools are going the way of other document creation tools. Graphic designers use desktop publishing software to design and lay out pages without even thinking about the computer codes that actually generate the document. As the tools for Web page design become more sophisticated, knowledge of HTML is becoming less essential to the process.

Visual Web page editors allow you to design and construct Web pages as you would documents using word processor or page layout software. To create bold type, for example, you select the text and apply bold formatting, which produces the following HTML:

<B>Sample bold text</B>

You need never even look at the <B> tags responsible for formatting the text as bold in the browser.

Visual editors have a fundamental drawback. Unlike other document description languages, such as PostScript, HTML was never intended to be used to create sophisticated layouts. HTML was designed to describe the structure of documents, with only incidental attention to their visual properties. Bending what is essentially a structural markup language to accommodate complex page layouts requires workarounds and makeshift solutions, and the results can be unpredictable. Given the limitations of HTML, visual Web editors are at a disadvantage in providing the same WYSIWYG interface as other document creation tools. As a result, what you see may not be what you get, particularly when pages have complex layouts. Although these tools purport to save time and effort, you may spend more time wrestling with the software than you would writing your own HTML.

That said, these programs are gaining popularity as the preferred method for creating Web pages. The WYSIWYG method of working with documents is far more accessible to most users. Also, the software is getting better - more stable, generating more robust HTML - which means that the results are more predictable. If you are not interested in writing code, a visual editor is probably the most sensible tool to choose.

Conversion utilities

Computers have been common in education for long enough that much of what you use to teach may already be in a digital format. Now that so many people are using the Web to distribute information, most file formats have at least one method for conversion into a Web-readable format. For example, you may have course documents written in Microsoft Word that you want to publish on the Web. You could use one of the Web authoring tools described above to re-create the documents, or you could use a utility such as Word's "Save as HTML" option to convert the documents from Word format to HTML. If all goes well, the Web page document would look much as it looked when printed from Word.

If you are using the Web simply to distribute existing course materials, you may be well served by a conversion utility. Such a site would be a repository of course documents, so uniformity and integration of the documents would not be necessary.

For a course Web site, however, you cannot simply convert documents for Web use without attempting to tie the documents into a coherent presentation. To use existing materials as part of an instructional site, consider combining an authoring tool and a conversion utility, or using the conversion features that are built into your authoring tool. That way, you can convert existing course materials to HTML and then incorporate them into your overall site design.

Templates

Looking at a blank Web page and trying to determine what you want to achieve can be for some like staring at a blank canvas, paintbrush in hand, and having no idea how to get what's in your head onto the canvas. The Web is empowering because it provides autonomy, but it's also intimidating and even unrealistic: we are expected to be able to express our ideas visually and verbally and to be savvy enough in our use of technology to convey them using fairly sophisticated software and programming.

A template can be a good answer for people who are less comfortable with the design and layout aspects of Web site authoring. A template is a basic HTML file with the codes for page and typographic layout already in place. To use a template you need only to fill in the content, like a coloring book: with the outlines in place, you supply the color.

Using a template holds many advantages. If you are new to Web authoring, it is a good way to develop a useful and attractive site quickly without having to master the nuances of HTML. If after time the template does not suit you and you have a greater understanding of Web authoring, you can modify the template or create a new one. Templates also benefit the user by enforcing consistency. Putting your content into a template ensures that all the pages of your site will have a standard look and feel.

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