Simple Tips on How to Work on This Site:

Sign in with our username and password at www.homestead.com

There will be a login process and then a screen where you pick what you want to do. There should be an easy-to-locate "Work on My Website" choice. Click that.

If you are using AOL, this is a problem with Homestead, which will come up with some sort of explanation as to how to deal with it. Sorry I don't remember those details at all, but Homestead can explain it.

There are Help files within Homestead that answer lots of questions, but hopefully most things can be explained here. If it's not explained here and you can check there, there should be an answer.

There are two ways to work on the site: online, and offline

To work on the site online, it helps if you have

a) a LOT of patience

b) a fast modem (unlike my dial up modem), a cable or DSL or T1 modem

c) some time, since it is generally slow

To work on the site offline, which generally is much faster, and less time and energy consuming, you need to be willing to dowload this entire website onto your harddrive. This will take 45 minutes or so to do. This will also take up some room on your PC.

If you download the site, and the homestead "site builder" onto your PC, after that you can work on this site offline any time, and upload your changes later. This also prevents the loss of work you're doing if you get knocked offine while working on the site (very frustrating). The one drawback is, many of the homestead "editor" features, like adding site navigation or seeing what your HTML looks like in a graphic, if you add HTML, is not going to be available offline. But generally, it is MUCH EASIER to work on this site offline than online 

Homestead's software used to frequently crash the computers of a couple of us, but I find that rarely happens anymore. They seem to have made some improvements.

First some Emergency Tips for Trouble-shooting:

If you delete something by mistake -

You can easily delete either a word or an entire page (the entire box with all the writing in it) on Homestead, which I've done many times, by mistake. To fix this, immediately go to the Edit option on the toolbar at the top of the page. Click Edit. Then click Undo Delete. Whatever you just deleted should pop back up then. If it doesn't, there are still ways to save it.

You deleted a lot or messed up things that you can't fix:

You can turn the page right back to the way it was before you saved it last, by going to the File option on the toolbar at the top of the page. Click File, then click "Revert to Saved". A little pop-up box will ask "Are you sure you want to revert to the last saved version of this page?" Click Yes or Ok, and then it will revert.

Your last saved option was also a mistake so you can't revert the page to the way it originally looked. In other words, things are screwed up and you don't know what to do.

This can happen. We are all human. Please just Log Out now, of Homestead, and do not publish your page you're working on at all. That way, the published version that is online will remain the way it was before you worked on the page, as long as you did not publish any of your changes. If you did publish your changes, try the "Revert to saved" option above. If that does not work, email the other people who work on this site. Someone else with the site downloaded onto her harddrive can upload it and put the old version of the page back online.

Creating a new page:

To create a new web page on this site, when you get the first set of options which is "create a new page? or open an existing page?", click, create a new page

Then it will ask if you want to use a template or if you want a blank page. Choose, Blank Page.

This website isn't in templates, although originally the index page was in a Homestead template. Or to explain this better, this website's pages were all started as "blank pages". They are still made with the easy Homestead software, but they're not generic looking.

Fonts

On most pages on this site now the fonts are hopefully alike, as that sort of makes things look better. The heading for each page (the title at the top of the page) is usually in Dark Orange, in size 12 or 14 Bold, Comic Sans.

All these choices are at the top of the screen with Homestead. You pic the font (comic sans), the color (dark orange), the size (12 or 14), and Bold or Underlined or Italic (bold), up there. To the right of those options you will see the alignment options. The heading for your page should be aligned in the center of the page. That's for the heading.

The actual text of most pages is in Helvetica (font name), in size 10 or 12, usually 12, and in plain black, so it's easier to read, and aligned to the left.

So the Heading Should Look Something Like This (Comic Sans, 14, Dark Orange, Bold, Center Alignment)

But the text of the page should look something like this (Helvetica, 12, plain without bold or underlining or italics, and aligned to the left-hand side of the page)

Page Background

Most pages are all white in background now on purpose - it is easier for most people to read then when the backgrounds are in different colors. So please keep the background just plain white for now. Homestead will let you pick any number of colors or designs to use as a background. This may seem cool but when the site is actually online a lot of them turn out to be too dark for the writing to be read, and they won't match the rest of the site.

Page Properties

When you are creating a new page, you have to also set the Page Properties.

To just see an example of this, you can look at the page properties of this page, and see what i wrote.

This is under the "Page" option on Homestead's toolbar at the top of the page. Click Page then Properties, and a screen with a bunch of options comes up.

On that screen please change the Page Size to 650 as I've done that with almost every page (if not every page) on this site, because when it is left with the default size - 800 - the pages are too big and take too long to load on people's browsers. 650 is much closer to the typical size webmasters like to use, not that 800 that you will see there. So please switch that.

There is an option for Link Color and Visited Link Color

Please use red as the link color for all the pages you work on, so they will match most of the other pages on this site, and orange or dark orange for the visited link color. Thanks.

You will need to enter the title of the page here too. This is the writing that is going to show up in the top of the browser, when people open the page you're working on after you put it online. So try to use something that describe what is on the page. Please do not leave this blank, as it will then just show up with nothing that says what the page is about. Also having the writing that actually describes what is on the page helps with search engien results.

When you are in this option there is also a blank square space where you type in a description of the page. This is used for search engine results too, it becomes Meta Tags. Unlike with most websites made from scratch, making metatags on Homestead is really easy, so you just type in a written description (a couple of sentences or a paragraph) there about what this page is about, and you can also mention that this is a feminist website for women with disabilities if you want to add that.

Beneath that square space is an open space for leaving words used for Meta Tags. This is also important to do for search engine results. Many people find this website through search engines so it's good to have in there words that describe both the page you are creating and the website itself. Generally most pages here are related to disabled women, so I tend to put the words something like this: disabled, disabilities, disability, women, womyn, girls, grrls, woman, sick, chronic illnesses, invisible disability, psychiatric disability, mental illness, mental health, advocacy, awareness, activism, empowerment, feminism, equality, accessibility, access, etc......

That is just a general example. The words you pick should really relate to the page you're making and what is on it, but also some words that let people know this is a site for women with disabilities are good to put there. These words are supposed to be entered with commas in between each word. I add whole phrases sometimes, though I'm not sure if this works with the meta tags or not.

Add a return link please

Lots of us, on many of the pages here, have forgotten to add any link to the home page of the site, so later somebody has to go back and fix that. When you create a new page, please add a Return Home link to the Index page (that's the main page) of the site. You do this by writing the words out in plain text Return Home, and then select these words with your mouse. Click "Link" on the toolbar at the top of the page. A form (a java applet) will pop up for you to put your link in. In this case, you're linking to a page already  on the site. This is in the first option. You select Index with the drop down menu. Click OK. Your link is then a link.

Saving your page

When you're doing creating your new page, to save it, you go to the File option on the toolbar at the very top. Click Save As. Then you pick a name for your page. Please try to pick something that describes what's on the page or, if it's a piece of writing, you can always just use the title the other gave it. Please don't title it something really generic, like "links 2" because later, it's impossible for us to remember what that page is when we open the site up to work on it (I made this mistake in the beginning). You type in your name for your page click OK, and the page is saved. You can then click View, if you want to see what it looks like in a browser, or you can go ahead and click Publish to put it online.

Publish Your Page

At some point you do have to click Publish for your page to get online with the rest of the site. You have to be online, of course, when you do this.

If you're working on the site offline, you can go onto the internet, then click Publish. You will get a little pop up that says "You must be connected to publish a page". Click "I am Connected" (that's one of the two options), and then it will let you publish your page. If you have also added the link to your new page, to another part of the site, like the index or the writing index (which hopefully you did!), you can click Publish All the Pages In this Website, by putting clicking the little box for that option when it comes up. This will take longer than publishing one page but it will update the entire site at once.

Adding Links or Information

To go into an existing page, when you log in, just click "Open an existing page" and then a list of all the pages on this site will pop up in a little java applet on your screen. Click on the page you want to open. Click OK.

The Recommended Books Page

If you're adding books to the Books page, please try to put them in a category that fits somehow. If no category exists that is right for this book, go ahead and add a new book category.

The book categories are all in either Helvetica or Comic Sans (i can't remember right now) font, in size 12 or 14 in Dark Orange, Bold. If you create a new book category, please try to make it look like the rest of the other category names by using that kind of font.

The rest of the writing on the Books page is just in plain black Helvetica font, size 12.

Please add as much information as possible on the book. It's ok if you just have the title, but if you happen to have: author's name, date of publication, publisher, and any comment you want to make on the book, or a comment that was submitted by someone with the permission to add it to the page, please add that too.

The book title, so people know it's the title, should be put into Italics. You do this by selecting the words with your mouse, then click the I on the top, righthand corner of the Homestead toolbar at the top of the page. There's a B for Bold, a U for Underline, and an I for Italics there. It should be easy to find.

Aligning Your Text to the Right side of the page and Fonts:

When you're working on the books page, the titles and information on books are aligned to the left of the page, so hopefully that will work automatically for you, but if not, just click the text and choose that left-align button on the righthand corner of the toolbar, which just looks like a bunch of lines aligned to the left.

Right next to that is a Center button, where the lines are centered, and then a right-align button, where the lines are aligned to the right. We generally use the Left-Aline button for all the text on this website, except for titles of pages or categories which are usually Centered.

So if it's aligned to the right it should look like this, and be in this kind of font. (Helvetica, 12, Black, plain  - no bold, no underline, no italics, aligned to the left)

  If it's aligned to the center it should look

like this and be in this kind of font (Comic Sans, 14, Dark Orange, Bold, Centered) or

This kind of font (Helvetica, 12, Dark Orange, Bold, Centered)

or this (Helvetica, 14, Dark Orange, Bold, Centered)

More tips to come......