Applying for a web account

If a department, institute, school, centre or any other sort of unit within UCL wishes to have its own web site, space can be made available on the UCL web server.

To apply for space, you must complete a W-form, which you can obtain by mailing web-support@ucl.ac.uk. The form must be authorised by your departmental computer representative.

Completing and returning the W-Form will result in the registration of a special userid, the 'Web account' for your unit. This is preferable to having a unit's Web pages in an individual's personal filespace, as that person might leave, and his or her files would be deleted. Although the Web account belongs to the whole unit, we ask that a member of staff takes responsibility for it in case of possible computer misuse under that account. We therefore also ask that a new W-form is completed when responsibility for the Web account is passed from one person to another.

The name of the Web account is assigned by Information Systems. For a full department, the name is based on the four-letter department code followed by `www'. For example, the Department of Phrenology, 'ucph' say, would have the Web account userid 'ucphwww'. If further Web accounts are required for groups within a department, userids of the form 'ucphw3a', 'ucphw3b', etc. would be allocated.

The W-form gives you the opportunity to choose a URL for your home page. This will be a name at the top of our Web tree, such as http://www.ucl.ac.uk/phrenology/. Conventionally, this is the unit name in lower case, with multiple words separated by dashes, for example http://www.ucl.ac.uk/clinical-phrenology/, but the choice is yours providing it doesn't clash with an existing name.

We recommend the use of lower case, as it's easier to tell people in conversation or over the phone. The name chosen will also be used to make an e-mail alias which you can quote on your Web pages so that your readers can give you feedback. The e-mail alias will be the directory name followed by '-www', e.g. phrenology-www@ucl.ac.uk.