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Creating and publishing a website
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Having registered a domain name and obtained your web space (your hosting), you can design your website on
your PC and then upload it to your web space via FTP. This will make it accessible to anyone who visits your website at www.(your-domain-name).com, for example.
A website consists of one or more web pages which may be linked together to allow visitors to view your content in a logical manner.
A web page is simply a file of text written in a code called
HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which tells the visitor's web browser how to display the content of that page. The HTML may be written entirely by you, or generated on-the-fly by scripting languages such as PHP and Perl. Scripting languages are discussed elsewhere in this 'help' section - all that this section will
tell you how to do is to publish some simple pages on the web.
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There are many tools you can use for creating your web pages. If you know HTML, or are teaching yourself from a book, you can use a text editor program to write your HTML files. A simple text editor is the Notepad program that comes
with Windows, and this is fine. There are also specialised text editors for developing code for web pages, such as Arachnophilia and, for advanced users, PHPEdit.
However, if you want a program that lets you design and lay out your web pages the way that you want them to look (without having to know any HTML) then you should use a web design tool.Microsoft Frontpage
(Frontpage express, which is a cutdown version of Ms Frontpage is available
to download free at
microsoft.com) is a very popular example, and Netscape Composer (which comes as part of the Netscape Communicator package) is also very good. If you want to create a very professional
website and want a top of the range design tool, which you also have to pay for, than we recommend Macromedia Dreamweaver Ultradev (available to download free
for 30 days from macromedia.com). Dreamweaver is used in conjunction with Adobe Photoshop (an image creation program) by professional web designers throughout the world.
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Use this simple example to create your first homepage. Start the Notepad program on your computer. Click here to view some simple HTML (this is the web page that it produces).
Select all of the example HTML code and copy and paste it into your Notepad program. Examine the code - look for the page title and the text on the page - change these for some words of your own. Now, save the Notepad file somewhere on your own P.C as 'index.html'. Important : When you are
saving web pages on your Acelogic web space, the homepage must be called 'index.htm' or 'index.html' in order for the web server to show something when people visit www.(yourdomain).com . Other pages can be called anything you like (because you'll be providing specific links to them from your homepage) - the only restrictions on filenames are that they may consist only
of letters, numbers and the '-' and '_' characters. They are also case sensitive, so the web server will consider 'MyPage.html' to be a different page to 'mypage.html'.
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When you've saved your copy of index.html, as described above, or have created your website to your satisfaction using any of the other means that we've discussed, it's time
to upload the site to your public web space. This is the procedure that will make them available to the Internet at large. There is a number of ways that you can do this. In all
of these cases, you will need to locate the FTP (link, server, username and password details) that we sent you by email when you first purchased your web space from Acelogic. Once you've found this information, proceed as follows :
- If you used a program like Microsoft Frontpage or Dreamweaver, you should use the built-in FTP features that these programs offer. Their help functions should tell you what to do.
- If you wrote your own web pages using a text editor, or created the index.html file given in the example above, start Windows Explorer on your P.C and locate your local files (e.g index.html). Now click the FTP link that was given in the email that we sent you - this will open your
web space in the Internet Explorer program. Now, simply drag and drop your files from Windows Explorer into the FTP space that was opened in Internet Explorer. You should over-write the default 'index.htm' file that is already in your web space.
- As an alternative to using Internet Explorer, you may use a dedicated FTP program such as WS-FTP.
This is a free FTP program with many powerful features. You can download the full version
from their web site. For specific instructions on how to use WS_FTP with our web hosting accounts, please
click here
In all cases, you should make sure that your website is copied into the public_html directory within your web space.
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Web development must be learned by reading and practice. Apart from HTML, other languages and technologies such as JavaScript and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can be used to make your web pages more powerful and better looking. A huge number of books and on-line resources exists on all these subjects. If you want books which are easy to read, full of examples
and quick to produce results, look for books in the SAMS 'Teach yourself ...... in 24 hours' range. For a more in-depth, academic perspective, look for books published by O'Reilly. All these books can be also be purchased in the UK from Amazon. As an on-line resource we recommend W3 Schools which has an excellent HTML tutorial.
If you still can't find what you are looking for
feel free to e-mail us with your questions at support@acelogic.com.
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For more information on the web development software described on this page, please see our Web Development Tools pages.
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