uploading newsletters

Guide to Uploading a Newsletter to Your Website

This guide assumes you already have a school website on the web with a ‘newsletters’ page (ie somewhere to upload the current newsletter to).

• Step One – Preparing the Newsletter

Decide how you want to display the newsletter. There are two main ways we recommend, a simple cut & paste or a PDF file.

Cutting and pasting is the easiest option, best when your newsletter is text based and you are not concerned about any images, sponsors logos or graphic content. Open the local version (the copy on your PC) of your newsletter webpage (newsletter.html for example) and copy and paste the text from your Publisher (or whatever) newsletter. Reformat the text if necessary and save the page. It’s now ready to upload – go to step Two.

The PDF (Portable Document Format) route is the way to go if you have a newsletter with pictures, text. logos etc. Probably the majority fall into this category. To accomplish this you’ll need to be able to save your newsletter in the .pdf format (readable by Adobe Acrobat, a free application available for download here ). There are free programs that will let you do this…we use PDF Factory.

Download and install PDF Factory.
Open your newsletter with what ever program you use to create it, often Microsoft Publisher.
Choose ‘Print’ from the ‘File’ menu – if the installation has completed correctly you should be able to choose ‘pdf factory’ from the drop down Printer: Name menu. Click ‘OK’. You should now see a dialogue with ‘printed with pdf factory’ across the top and a picture of the first page of your newsletter. At the bottom of the page are some options – choose ‘save’. You can now save a version of your newsletter in .PDF format ready for uploading to the web.

• Step Two – Uploading

Once you have your newsletter in the correct format you are ready to upload it. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is the process used to upload a file from your PC to a machine on the internet (a web host). There is a guide to FTP here.

If you have used the cut & paste method outlined above, all you need to do is upload your newsletter web page to the correct place using the FTP guide and you’re done. If you have used the PDF option there are a couple of steps to follow. You need to upload the .pdf file you created to your webserver, and create a link from your newsletter webpage to that file, so that when a user clicks on the link, the PDF document is displayed in all its glory. The best way is to have the same files & folders on your PC as on the webserver.

Below is a screenshot from Dreamweaver showing the local (your PC) and remote (on the web host) views.

In this example the saved PDF newsletter (we’ll call it “june_2007.pdf”) is saved in the “newsletters” folder. We then create a link from our “newsletter.htm” page to this file. There is an example here.

Once the “newsletter.htm” has the link to the PDF in place, upload BOTH the newsletter.htm and the “june_2007.pdf” and you’re done…

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