A shop that has the latest, best equipment and large space would doubtless wish to highlight the fact, a shop that consisted of a glorified closet in a basement, might wish to obfuscate the fact.  (Unless the purpose is to put pressure on your administration for a new building, in which case, perhaps you should bring in some rats to create better photo opportunities.)   

The nature and focus of the content should be on what is relevant to your program in particular, and not based on some generic ideal of what a costume program “ought” to be about.  

Site Building Software 

The next part of your planning should center on what sort of software you intend to use to build your site.  In rare cases this may be dictated to you, but in most circumstances this choice will be yours.   There are two main factors to guide you in this:  1.  What is your level of computer ability?  And 2. What do you need the site to be able to do?

 As regards your computer ability:  No ability is required, although it helps.  Remember small children regularly manage to make web sites, so do idiots who think that the Holocaust never happened.  Think about this.  If you are reading this article, probably you have, or are working on, a terminal graduate degree.  If toddlers, sex perverts and White supremacists can build their own sites, so can you.    

If your computer abilities are very low, there are a number of options open to you for your first site.  The easiest option is to build on one of the various free services online (see list at end of article) that offer a “wizard” for site building.  A wizard is an online editor into which you type in text, and tell what photos are on your hard drive for use, and the wizard grabs copies of the photos, saves the text and builds a page for you.  This is how the small children build sites, how I built my first site, and how I recommend anyone begin.  Even if you plan on building your final site in a more demanding program, it is a good idea to use one of these wizards to build a short personal or hobby site, just to get your brain prepared for thinking in the non-linear fashion that web sites express best.   

The next easiest editor you can use is your word processor.  Microsoft Word was improved a few years ago to include the ability to save documents as web pages, many other recent word processors have followed suit.  Check the “save as” command in your WP to see if one of the options is “save as html”.  If it has this, all you need to do to make pages is to build documents as usual in your word processor and then save them as html files. 

If you are feeling slightly braver, you will want to build pages in a WYSIWYG editor (What you see is what you get).  These programs operate much like a hybrid between a wizard and a word processor and are still quite simple to learn to use.  They offer many more options than the other two programs and can build sites of unlimited size and complexity.  As an example, my site The Costumer’s Manifesto: http://www.costumes.org is entirely built in a WYSIWYG editor (my favorite, Microsoft FrontPage) although it has around 800 pages and 650mb of images.  I don’t know much html.  I don’t need to.  WYSIWYG editors abound, both for free (downloaded from the net) and for purchase.  If your university has paid a blanket site license for all Microsoft office programs for all faculty and staff, this includes FrontPage.  (Ask about this at your university.  It is very common for universities to purchase these licenses, and then not bother to tell the faculty & staff.  Your department may be buying duplicate software that your university has already paid for.)

Die-hard computer geeks can build sites directly in html (Hyper Text Markup Language, the language of the WWW).  This is slow and difficult, but allows for great precision and the maximum amount of techno gadgetry on the site.  To see a site with all the bells and whistles possible with html, plus Java, and Shockwave gadgets, see Kate Mendelowitz site for Lighting Design Interactive http://www.ldi.nu . 

 The second criterion for choosing a site builder program is: What do you want your site to look like or do?  This will help determine what kind of web editor you need to build it.  If you need to have forms on your site that send you back data (such as a sign up form for requesting student or rental information), sound or video you will need to use a higher end WYSIWYG editor, or html editor.  If all you need is pages with text, links, email form and images, you can use even the lowest level wizard to build your page. 

Preparing Images 

Part of what you should have determined when deciding on your site content is what images you want or need on your site.  Once you know what images you need, these are the steps you will use to prepare those images for your site. 

Pictures that you have already in print form, like show renderings, photos and slides, will need to be scanned onto disk or your computer.   You can do this yourself or send photos off to a lab like Seattle Film Works that will do it for you.  If you do this yourself, you need to know two things:  1. Screen resolution on the web is 72dpi regardless of the monitor size or settings of the computer receiving the data.  This means that if you scan a 3x4 photo at 300dpi and don’t reduce it, it will display as 12x16.  On the other hand, if you scan a slide at 72dpi, it will display no larger than the actual slide image.  Save your files to be the size you want seen based on 72dpi as the standard.  2.  For photos and renderings, the file format to save your pictures in will be jpeg (aka jpg) format, preferably in a low quality setting.  At 72dpi, low quality really does not show up much.  This will make your images into smaller file sizes that load more rapidly. 

 For new images, that is, images you just realized you need and haven’t photographed yet, you can do several things to get them in digital form ASAP.  If you have, and are most comfortable with, a film camera, you can simply take photos as usual, and then when you take the photos in for processing check the box to have them put either on floppy disk or CD ROM.  When your photos are returned they will come with pre scanned digital images on disk.  The disk will usually also have a free image editor you can install on your computer to convert the images to smaller sizes, different file types (like jpeg), and do minor photo corrections.  Floppies often have the advantage of having images in jpeg, but are so-so quality.  CD’s have high quality scans, but you usually need to convert them to jpeg and reduce their size. 

The other even easier, faster option is that you can beg, borrow or buy a digital camera to take photos directly into digital media.  You want to do this with a medium or high-grade digital camera, not the Barbie model sold for kids, or one of those tiny digital “spy” cameras, because these cameras produce rather grainy pictures.  My favorite mid-level digital cameras are the Sony Mavica series that puts images directly in jpeg form onto floppy disks.   Since you need your images to be in jpeg form anyway this saves you the trouble of converting them.  Also floppies are cheap, and available everywhere, whereas the various data chips and cards that other cameras use are not.   Both however are reusable, which can, in certain instances make them cheaper than film. 

 Web Links:

Other Costume Shops/Programs on the Net You can see as Examples

Theatre UAF Costume Shop (My Own Costume Shop Page):  http://www.costumes.org/subwebs/uafcostumeshop/uafcostweb.htm

Dalhousie University Costume Studies Studios and Museum  http://www.dal.ca/costume/index.html

  NY City Ballet Costume Shop http://www.nycballet.com/costumeshop/csindex.html