Uploading Your Web Site

Site Upload Tips:

The past several sections have dealt with deciding on a business, selecting site development software, choosing an ISP, and registering a domain name. Here’s a quick list of items to help structure your site before you upload: 

• Test all of your page links within your software before you upload!(You can do this in the preview mode of your web authoring software)
• Your site should be interesting not confusing. Think through your offer, service or product. 
• Sell your product or service shamelessly in your page copy, but do not mislead your potential customers. 
• If you feel comfortable with all of the above items, it is time to upload your web site to your server. 

Most of the website design software programs that are available today provide the FTP capability. Sometimes it's much easier to use than gathering the files into a folder and uploading it yourself.

If you have built your web site properly you should have a folder with your site name that contains the entire HTML and graphic files that makeup your site.  Each page, for example, within the folder should be a separate HTML file; this should be the name of each page.

Your graphics files should also be in place within this main folder. They do not necessarily have to be a sub of the exact HTML page, as long as they are within the master folder. It's important to note the use of graphic links within a site.  If you take the ultimate manual approach and use a simple html editor you may want to consider uploading your graphics to your server and creating absolut links to them within your website.

Let's say for example your header graphic is called header.jpg.  Once it's been uploaded to your site it now has a different address.  For example you uploaded all of your graphics in a folder called Site_graphics.  Now the header.jpg is within that folder so it's address is now:

http://www.yoursitename.com/site_graphics/header.jpg 

Instead of uploading your graphis in a folder and having pointers to them you can use their absolute address instead.

This would now be a good time to change your site name if you need to.

Uploading Tips: 

The uploading process is simple, however good planning and organization before uploading, is critical.  

Most web authoring software has FTP built into it so it is really very simple to upload your site. Dreamweaver, Net Objects Fusion and XSite Pro 2 all have FTP capabilities. If you are using NotePad or a very simple html editor you can get free open source FTP software from FileZilla http://filezilla-project.org/. It’s one of the best FTP programs I have ever used and it’s constantly being updated to provide you with the most current version. It is absolutely free, no strings attached.  

General Uploading Tips and Information:

• Your home page is always named index.html. It needs to be the first page to be uploaded. Someone many years ago decided that index.html is the name of the first page of the site, so that’s what it is.  
• Most FTP programs will ask you a) what is the name of your site e.g. www.mysite.com   
• What is the home directory? If you are installing into the root of your website leave this blank, otherwise state the directory the site will be installed in.  
• What is the FTPserver? This is usually the same as the website as www.mysite.com sometimes the server is looking for something like ftp.mysite.com 
• What is the FTP directory? If you are installing into the root of your site it is normally public_html (also sometimes as www. ) If you are installing into a separate directory, as above, then it will be public_html/directory_name TIP: Always install your site into the root of your site. The reason for this is it will be picked up better by the search engines for indexing.  
• What is your user name and password? It is looking for the user name and password that you were assigned when you opened your account.  

When you upload your site to your web hosting server, using ftp software, be sure to upload into the public_html directory of your domain your web host will have specific instructions. Also be sure that you have created a directory within your public_html section of your website and load all of you web site files to that directory. Most all web hosts provide step-by-step instructions to upload a site.  You can access these through the c-panel of your hosting account.  If you don’t have c-panel, good luck! 

Final Words:

Don’t be intimidated by this process. It’s almost as simple as saving a file on your PC from the from a disk drive to the hard drive. Just remember that you are uploading a combination of html and graphics files.  If you want the graphics files to be displayed properly you must have the correct "address" of the graphic file.  As I have said earlier website design software does all of this detail work automatically, so it's not an issue. For those of you who want the challenge, pay attention to the above rule.  

Resources:

FileZilla  Free FTP software.  Open Source.  It’s crazy not to take advantage of this. We use it on HBR almost every day.

This is Open Source software which means that it is completely free to download.

CuteFTP Free Trial Download. One of the best but you can get other FTP programs for free.