IB Research Website

1. Create a folder to contain your web page and your data files.  Put your data spreadsheet in this folder, as well as your paper and other files associated with your project.

2. Open your paper in Word and “Stupid Windows Button in the upper left corner” -> “Save as” and pull down the menu “Save as type:” to “Web Page, Filtered”, change the name to “index.htm” and click the “Save” button.  This makes Word (try to) not use MS Office specific stuff.  (i.e. the web page will work with Firefox and Safari etc)  It still makes crap for HTML, only less crap.  If you prefer to not use Word at all and understand how to use some other program, please feel free to do that.

3.  If your diagrams were hand drawn, you either need to scan them, or re-make them with some graphics software like MSPaint and save them as a.gif or .jpg in your folder.  Simply save these images into your folder and insert them from your HTML editor.  (Insert>Picture)  If your paper for some reason never had diagrams, well then you need to make them from scratch.

4. Open your data files in Excel, or whatever spreadsheet you used.  Then “save as” the file using a name with no spaces, and file format “text, tab delimited” into your folder.  (i.e. “data.txt”)  Do not go into your text file and change it in any way, even if it looks ugly, it will work.

5. Spiff up the bad stuff in your paper.  The original formatting might not still work, so you will need to go through and tweak stuff. 

6. Add a hyperlinked table of contents:  Go through and put targets or bookmarks (things you can hyperlink to) in logical places throughout your document.  Then create a table of contents at the beginning of the paper that is linked to the targets.  Also and put links to the table of contents throughout your page.  People should be able to get around your page without scrolling much. 

7. In your table of contents, create a link entitled “Go Up” to the URL “../index.htm”  (case sensitive – no http:// in front of it).  This will be the “Up” link to get out of your paper, and back to the page with links to all other papers.

8. Underneath graphs of data, type the words “Data file: text .:. Excel”, and hyperlink the word “text” to the text version of your data, and “Excel” to the Excel version.  Do this for every data set you used.  This way other researchers can get your data easily.

9. Make a section titled something like “Related Websites:”  Surf the web for related sites (be sure to include the web resources you used in your paper), then use paste the URL into the document and it will automatically create a link to that page. After the pasted link add a sentence about what you found interesting about that page, or why it was useful to you.  Try to find the best links, and try to find at least five of them.

10. Leave your folder (the one containing your web page) in the “My Documents” folder of a computer in my room, and have me check it over.  We won’t really know if it works until we load it onto the web server, and check it. Be sure to give it to me in plenty of time.