Site Update Tutorial
The
following instructions detail the preferred method of submitting
web site updates to MMCIS.
Email
Send by email
to webmaster@mmcis.com.
This ensures that your request will get processed in the shortest
time. If you send it to an individual's mailbox, they may be
on vacation or working on another project and not see it. Eemail
addressed to webmaster@mmcis.com is
received by all the webmasters so there is no need to copy
anyone on it.
In very rare
cases, a fax may be needed to convey a change. Please use our
eFax number 508 302-1064.
The example
below uses a page from our web site: http://www.mmcis.com/About/HomePage.html.
For small changes
to a page
To avoid
any confusion as to which page is being changed, cut and paste
the page address from the browser into the email message.
Here is where
to find the address if you are using Internet Explorer:
Here is where
you find it using Netscape:
Let's say
you wanted to change the text in the first paragraph, replacing
the phrase "Web Sites That Work" with "Web Sites
That Really Work". Your email would contain the following:
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on
page http://www.mmcis.com/About/HomePage.html
Change "Web
Sites That Work" to "Web Sites That Really
Work" in first paragraph.
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Alternatively,
you could cut and paste the entire paragraph, make the change
in place and send us
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on
page http://www.mmcis.com/About/HomePage.html
Replace
the first paragraph with the following:
Multi-Media
Communications Internet Services (MMCIS) provides
all the services needed to plan, develop, host, and
maintain web sites. We specialize in "Web Sites That
Really Work" providing e-commerce, customer support,
credit reporting, product delivery, and customized
business functions. Our approach is to work closely
with clients, first in planning, developing, and
integrating their web sites, and then providing ongoing
services tailored to each client's need.
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This way
we avoid misspellings and punctuation errors, and the changes
are made to the correct page. It is also a lot easier for us
to keep track of the changes and to report back to you when
they are done, or to indicate questions about a particular
change.
For wholesale page
changes
New page
content or page replacement content can be sent as a word document
attachment. Some things to be conscious of: - Don't use all
caps as these are shouting on the net. We have to go through
and convert to proper case and it is hard to know what should
be in all caps from the source (things like acronyms or company
names.). - Tabular data should be done in a word table. This
is easier for you and easier for us.
Unless you
are replacing the entire page, make sure that we know what
parts are new or changed. To designate this, turn on Highlight
Changes under the tools menu for Word. Then start with a document
that has the text from the current web page in it. You can
get this by saving the current web page from your browser and
then opening it in Word, or by cutting and pasting the text
from the browser into Word.
Some General Observations
Formats
For text changes,
plain text is best for small changes, for all others Word docs
are usually the best. Don't forget to use tables instead of
spacing or tabs to format tabular data. Excel is fine for tabular
data as well
For images, we
can take just about any format:
| images to be used as is on site: |
GIF, JPG, almost any other image format. (e.g., Photoshop,
EPS, TIFF, BMP, WMF, Illustrator format saved as 7.0 or before.) |
| images contain logos or other material to be resized or
otherwise manipulated |
For images from which we have to extract logos or other
elements, best format is Photoshop with layers preserved
or Illustrator (7.0 or below). Gifs and jpgs are usually
much harder to work with. |
PDFs, PowerPoint files, and Word documents are the last choice
for images since it is almost impossible to extract the images
with the original resolution.
FileNames
Most of our
sites are hosted on UNIX systems. This has implications for
file names. On Windows systems, image.GIF is the same file
as image.gif. On a UNIX system they are two different files.
For this reason, we insist that files you send us have all
lower case extensions, at least, and that you are careful about
keeping the filenames consistent from update to update. For
example, if you have a link on one of your pages to otherpage.html,
and you send us a new version of otherpage.html but it gets
sent with the file name Otherpage.html, there is a good chance
that the old page information will still be served. This is
because when we copy the new version of the page to your site,
it does not replace the existing page but instead becomes a
new file in the directory that no link points to (remember
the link points to otherpage.html not Otherpage.html).
Default Pages
The default
page is the page that gets served when an Address (location
or URL) does not specify a page. For example, http://www.mmcis.com
does not specify a page so the default page in the document
root directory will be served. This is often referred to as
the home page. Subdirectories also have default pages, e.g.:
http://www.mmcis.com/About
The normal
default page name on our servers is HomePage.html, with the
capital H and P significant. Occasionally a directory will
have index.html as the default page.
.HTML vs
.HTM
Normally,
pages are named with the extension: .html. We use .htm extensions
to post draft versions of pages or for other pages that we
don't want to be indexed.
Any questions on any
of this, email webmaster@mmcis.com
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