Introducing Your kinetic Service Web Site

Revised: April 19, 2007

Contents

• Overview
• Visiting Your Web Site in a Web Browser
• Viewing Your Web Site with an FTP Client
• Community Calendar
• Search Engine
• Reports
• Server Side Include and Custom Headers/Footers
• Web Access Controller

Overview

Each new kinetic service web site is configured with default files, directories, MOREnet-provide web applications, a search engine, activity reports and other tools. This document introduces these items for content managers and new customers of the kinetic service.

Important: Your website is hosted on a UNIX server where the / character is used to separate directory and file names. That notation is typically used in FTP clients to show directory paths and is used within this document for the same purpose.

Visiting Your Web Site in a Web Browser

After notification that your site is ready by MOREnet staff, you can begin working with your new web site. Replace {your-domain-name} in the URL below with the domain name provided by MOREnet to visit your web site and view the sample content:

http://{your-domain-name}/

When you first visit your web site in a browser, you'll see sample content that was created with items of interest for various audiences your site may have. This sample content includes several directories and files that you can modify:

• http://{your-domain-name}/index.shtml
  A default index page for the web site. You may remove it or modify it as needed.
• http://{your-domain-name}/search.shtml
  A sample search page. You may delete this file, but beforehand ensure that have integrated the search form into another web page so that visitors can search your site. For more information, see the Search Engine documentation.
• http://{your-domain-name}/community/
  This sample directory contains an index.shtml file with links of interest to a community. You may delete this directory and file.
• http://{your-domain-name}/helpdesk/
  This sample directory contains files with links of interest for those that assist with managing the web site. You may delete this directory and the files within it.
• http://{your-domain-name}/library/
  This sample directory contains an index.shtml file with information about online resources that may be available to you through MOREnet. You may delete this directory and file.
• http://{your-domain-name}/userserv/
  This sample directory contains an index.shtml file with links that are important if your site visitors have kinetic e-mail accounts. You may delete this directory and file.

Viewing Your Web Site with an FTP Client

To view the directories and files of your web site with FTP, use the FTP client of your choice to login with your kinetic service e-mail address and password. Specify ftp.{your-domain-name} for the Host Name/Address option in your FTP client and replace {your-domain-name} with the domain for your organization. For more information about configuring an FTP client, see Publishing to Your kinetic Service Web Site with FTP.

When you first login, a /WebPublish directory (folder) is displayed in your client. This directory provides a view to one or more web sites that your account has permission to modify. If your account does not have web publishing permissions to a site, the /WebPublish directory is empty. If your account has web publishing permissions, you can open the /WebPublish directory and it will display a subdirectory for each web site; the subdirectory names match the domain names of the sites. Each of these subdirectories group together all of the different directories relevant to a web site: the pages, the logs, the reports, etc. Open one of these directories to view the site's contents; this directory is considered the root directory of the web site. It contains several supporting directories for the site, including the /www directory that serves as the root directory for web site content. The /www directory is the only directory of interest to most web publishers since it is where publishers put content for the web site.

Important: Web site content begins in the /www directory. Other directories at the same level as /www provide supporting content and services. For more information about these, see Web Site File Guidelines and Directory Structure.

Community Calendar

An application that allows visitors to view and submit events of interest on a calendar. For more information, see the Community Calendar documentation.

Note: Do not link these applications to your site if you do not want to use them.

Search Engine

A search engine is automatically configured to index your site and provide the search mechanism for site visitors. The default /www/search.shtml file contains a sample search form. For more information, see the information provided in the Search Engine documentation.

Reports

MOREnet provides reports for every kinetic service domain. For example, web server logs for your site are analyzed for daily, weekly, and monthly site statistics and monthly page view reports. These reports can help you learn how visitors are using your web site. See Reports for more information.

Server Side Include and Custom Headers/Footers

Server Side Include is a feature provided by the web server that allows you to place special commands in your web pages so that dynamic content is automatically added to pages by the web server. This feature is most often used to easily create a consistent appearance across a site by including common elements within pages, such as headers and footers, as well as automatically insert information such as the last modification date. The default header and footer shown consistently across your sample web site are created using this functionality. See Server Side Include and Custom Headers/Footers documentation for more information.

Web Access Controller

This tool allows you to password protect areas of your web site. This application is also used by the Calendar for restricting administrative areas of the application. For more information, see the Web Access Controller documentation.