Gail Breese

Now you have created your new website and corrected any little errors by checking with a validation program, you are almost ready to upload all the files to the World Wide Web.

There are two things you will need to organise first:

1. Your domain name and website hosting providers.
2. A way of publishing your site's files to the World Wide Web.
   

Before you can put your website onto the internet, you will need to create an account with a webhosting provider. Website hosting refers to companies who provide space for your website files on their servers. There are free providers and paid providers. I would recommend the latter for these reasons:

1. Many internet service providers will offer their customers free website space to use. They don't offer much space, i.e. only 20 megabytes and if you have a large site, you may not qualify for the free service. Also, your website URL (Uniform Resource Indicator) will appear in the browsers bar as something like this: http://www.freewebsitehosting.com/~mysite.com.html  As you can see, this is rather unwieldy, unprofessional and hard to remember. So paid internet service providers are the way to go. I have found them to be not that expensive.
   
2. To have your own unique URL, you will need to register your domain name, i.e. www.mysite.com with a domain hosting provider. In many cases, you can get your webhosting and domain name hosting from the same provider, which does simplify things.

Once you have organised your website hosting, you will need the username and password provided by the website hosting company. They will send you an email confirming your new domain hosting and information required to upload your website files.

Now you are ready to upload your new website files.

This is done by File Transfer Protocol, or FTP. ; This is a client (FTP program) installed on your computer to connect to your host or server.

There are many free programs you can use. I use one called Core FTP Lite.

 Core FTP LE 1.3c: free version.  It is very simple to use. It has a window on the left side where the website files on your computer are displayed and on the right, a window will contain the uploaded files that will be displayed on the web. You can either drag and drop the files across or highlight the file and click the little arrow to upload it.

Others you could try are:

TomaWeb's Simple FTP. A free client for Windows

RightFTP  Easy to use for beginners and has enough features to meet the requirements of power users. Has an Explorer like interface and allows you to drag and drop the files.

AceFTP. Designed in a Windows XP fashion. Easy to use.

And for Macs:

Cyberduck  An open source FTP and SFTP (Secure File Transfer) for Mac OS X. Uploading and downloading can be activated by drag and drop.

Some HTML editing programs, like DreamWeaver, include an FTP client within the program so you would be able to upload your files from there.

So now you have your domain name registered and you have somewhere to upload your files to, but there is one more thing you need to do:

Check and check again!

1. Are all the links on your website working as you intended? Broken links can drive visitors away. Internal links are those that send the visitor to another page on your own site. An external link sends them away from your site to someone else's and that's not what you want to happen. So make sure that an external link opens in a new window, not the same window as your site. 
   
2. Check your website pages in your HTML editing program again before you upload the files. Spelling errors and display issues are easy to miss, especially if you have a lot of pages on your site.
   
3. After you have uploaded the files, check them again online. A broken link, a blank page or a missing graphic can appear amateurish.

Now your visitors will be able to view your new website and enjoy your information and content. Congratulations!

Copyright (C) Gail C Breese, 2009