You will need two important materials to begin designing for the web: personal web space, file transfer program (ftp) and a text editor. Many of the programs mentioned below are already installed on NCSU computers. You may want to make sure you have these programs available on your personal computers.

First, you will need what is called a web server to store files and create web pages that people can see on the Internet. North Carolina State University offers free personal web space up to 2GB for students and other affiliates. Please go to http://oit.ncsu.edu/afs/www-setup and follow the directions to set up your personal web space. Your url will be http://www4.ncsu.edu/~yourusername once your file space is officially set up by the Office of Information Technology.

Second, you will need a program that allows you to transfer files from your computer to your personal web space that makes your files available for other people to see on the Internet. Please download and install ExpanDrive as your ftp program: http://www.eos.ncsu.edu/remoteaccess/windows.php. You can also download one of the other programs as you see fit for your needs.

Third, you will need a plain text editor. Typically, designers create web sites with “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) software. In this course, we will mainly use plain text editors, such as Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Macintosh). Please make sure you have a plain text editor install on your computer. Visit http://www.webstandardistas.com/tools for other plain text editors that you can install.