RWD Basics
The most basic and mandatory of rules when using RWD to make your new webpage is never, ever
rename "Home Page". The main page of your site must always be named "Home Page" with only one
space between Home and Page and none before or after. There also must be a page named "Home Page"
within each Course or Subsite container. You can link directly to a page within a container that is not
named "Home Page" but any non direct links to that container would not work. It is the RWD version
of index.html.
For example:
the link wbhs.district.bcs/teachers/directory would work if there was a page named directory inside the
container teachers. However, if there is no "Home Page" within the teachers container the link
wbhs.district.bcs/teachers would come up broken.
Another rule to keep in mind when naming things is though it appears as if there are two sections in each
container, there is really only one and the split is simply to let you easily keep containers (on the left) separated
from pages and items (on the right). This means you never want to name things on the left the same name
as anything on the right; this will make things act strange as it may not consistently point to the desired item.
You should try to develop a habit of naming things without using spaces; but this is especially true for
containers as spaces in a container will quickly lead to broken links. Try using underscores (_) instead of spaces
or running words together and using capital letters to separate the words.
For example:
ClassCalendar or Class_Calendar instead of Class Calendar.
For the most part.... RWD is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. You type in text tell
it to be GREEN and it shows up on the web as green text. Easy cheesy. When it comes to text, you have total control. You can change color, characteristic, font style (Times New Roman, Tahoma) and font size. Please be a little careful about the over-use of color or huge fonts on a page. Some things that won't reflect exactly between your RWD document and how your page looks
through a web browser are page format and background color. Background color will not come through, it is set to white and page format like spacing can be off a bit. At times you may need to add extra carriage returns into your page in RWD to get the desired result online.
Another very common practice to do with text is to make the text a link; this is done in RWD by hi-lighting
the text you wish to be a link, right clicking it, and selecting Make Link.. You will then get a context menu
that looks similar to this:
In the section under Target URL, type the link you want to go to http://www.nasa.gov for example. The
Link to Marker: section is for linking to different parts of your webpage. Link title: is what will be displayed
if someone hovers their mouse over the link. Window: tells the page how to open the link, I would usually
recommend having links open in a new window so people don't lose your site accidentally when they close
your link. Firstclass is smart enough to automatically make links for typed out URLs like the one earlier to
NASA and e-mail addresses without having to tell it to make them links.
If you are linking to something within your own site, you don't need to use the entire URL path. For instance:
This is the link to my RWD Basics page. As long as there is a page or a subcontainer named Basics in the same
container as this page, that is all I need to type to link to it. If the Basics page were in a subcontainer called
Folder1 then this link would need to be Folder1/Basics. There is a fundamental difference in RWD between
Folder1/Basics and /Folder1/Basics The "/" in front of Folder1 on the second example tells RWD to link
back to the root of the buildings website.
You will also notice that in this example, since I am linking to another page in my own site, I changed the
"Window:" link to Use Same Window since they won't be leaving my site.
There are several methods to get pictures into an RWD page. I will explain the two ways I use the most.
1.) Copy and Paste - This is the method I personally use most often. I would recommend pasting from your
clipboard into a program like Paint for minor edits and cropping and then copy from there and paste into
your webpage. Remember, it will paste directly into the document wherever your cursor is and will 'snap'
into the page aligned Left Inline at 100% size.
2.) Insert... - Selecting Image/File from the Insert... menu is the other easy way to get images into an RWD
page. Using this method allows you to directly upload images to your webpage that you have saved on
your hard drive.
Just as with text, you can make any picture into a link. Simply Right-Click the picture, click Make Link.. and
follow the same instructions from above for creating a link out of text.
The solid red dot is a Marker, inserted from the Insert...
menu; which can be used to mark places in your
webpage that you want to link to.
The red dot with a white arrow inside it is called a pill.
The pill marks a link in RWD. So whatever follows the
pill, text or a picture will be a link. If you delete a pill, it
will delete the link ability of whatever item it was tied to.
The Navigation Sidebar tab is where each page's Menu on the left-most side of the screen is pulled.
As you can see, the listings under 'Display Text' match the Navigation Sidebar of that page when using
a web browser. Spaces in names are fine under 'Display Text' as you can see in the example. The
Headline checkbox can be used to differentiate menus from submenus. The color and style of the
Navigation Sidebar menu is controlled by the district as are the links that appear on every page in a
building. (District Home Page and School Home Page in the example)
The 'Link to' area is where the actual links are made that the 'Display Text' points to. If you were to create
a new webpage in this container named MathFacts, you could link that page in your Navigation Sidebar
under 'Display Text' as Math Facts and under 'Link to' you would type MathFacts.
The 'Special Format' section in the Navigation Sidebar panel is set to none by default whenever you Add
or Insert a new row. If you are linking to webpages you don't need to change anything here. You will only
need to set it to a different format if you are linking directly to a special container or a calendar. The formats
you will most often use would be Message Blog or one of the Calendar Views. If you have made a new
Calendar and linked it but it isn't appearing correctly on the web, check to see if you have this set correctly.
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