Publishing
Now that you have designed your website and want to show it to your friends and other people, you need to publish it.
How to publish it?
To publish your website you'll have to transfer it to a webserver.
What are webservers?
Webservers are computers that are specifically used to publish websites to the world.
You can make your own computer a webserver. In order to do so, you need to dedicate a computer for this purpose. You will need to have 24 hour internet connection with good uploading speed and a fixed ip-address from your internet service provider. You will also need to setup a server software on you machine to make it work as a server.
Consider a webhost
You don't need to setup a webserver of your own, infact most people don't and only business organizations do this usually. You can use the services of a webhost.
Webhosting companies own web servers and they can publish your website for you, you just need to pay them a service fee, which depends on what services you want. Now a days, cheap starter web hosting packages are available which you can consider, when starting a website.
You can also find free webhosting usefull in some cases. See webhosts and free websites for more information.
Do you have a domain name?
Before you publish your site you need to have a name of your site that will function as its url address. These addresses are called Domain names in very simple terms. So if you don't have a domain name registered for your website , register it now. See Domain names for more information.
Uploading
Uploading is the process of transfering your webpages along with their associated data (like images, sounds, scripts etc) onto the webserver of your webhost so that anyone with an internet connection can view it.
Many hosts offer an http based uploading tool to upload your files to their webserver. You can use these tools to upload your files if you donot have much files to deal with.
A much common way is to upload your files using an FTP uploading software. You can use any FTP program that does the job. Some common examples are FileZilla and Smart Ftp. See my guide to how to use filezilla to upload your files.
You can also use the FTP uploading feature of DreamWeaver, if you used it to design you website.
The things that you will need to upload you website are;
- Address/Host name. This will be the address of the server you are uploading your files to.
- Your user name issued to you by the webhost
- Your password
- An FTP program
Connect the Ftp prgogram to the host server using your user name and password. After connecting, most ftp programs show you two windows, one corresponds to the files on your local computer and one corresponds to the files on the remote server(host server), which you can easily use to transfer files to the server.
Note: The standard default page (home page) of your website has the name 'index.html' or 'index.htm'.
Related:
Domain Names
Web Hosts
Free Websites
Link to this page :
Copy and paste the following code in an html document to link to this page,