Web Hosting Info

Simple File Upload

Your host may have a control panel from which you can perform various functions on your site. Once you have logged into your site’s control panel, look for an item labelled “File Manager” or similar. From there you will be given a list of folders and documents, similar to what you would see on your home computer.

It is important that you find the correct folder to upload to, some folders are not accessable to the general public. On most web hosting services you should upload to the folder called public_html or www. You must also name your home page index.html or default.html. Obviously some hosting providors are different so if these don’t work for you, contact them. From the public_html folder you will be able to make other folders for instance a folder in the public_html folder named images would be accessed by yoursite.com/images

FTP Transfer
Some WYSIWYG editors include a file transfer manager within them so you will need to configure your WYSIWYG client with your login information. This FTP login details may be the same as your control panel account, however if it isn’t make a FTP account within your site’s control panel.
After logging into your site’s FTP server, you need to browse to the same location as you would do in simple file upload, public_html. From there you can drag and drop your files and upload your site’s content.

Google page creator is a free online website maker from Google. It requires no HTML skills and features a WYSIWYG web based editor. They will also host your site as a sub-domain for example. yourname.googlepages.com.

After logging in to the site, you are presented with a Gmail like design. It lists all your pages and you can edit them, delete them or even tell your friends about them by emailing them from your Gmail account which is a nice feature.

There are 41 design templates and 4 layout templates available for you to choose from so you don’t even have to design anything. You can also switch between a design view and go to HTML.On other free services space is usually limited however Google allows you to have up to 100MB. Bandwidth at this time is unknown.

When creating a site it has a useful auto-save feature that automatically saves your site at regular intervals so if you close your browser by accident, you don’t loose all your work.

Unfortunately though you can not host your own domain name and you are limited to what you can do, you can not run advanced scripts on the service.

http://pages.google.com/

If you don’t feel like learning HTML then it is great to use a WYSIWYG editor. These allow you to build web pages by showing you exactly what they will look like when they are viewed through a web browser.

There are several WYSIWYG editors avaliable for you to use, both free and paid;

Microsoft Frontpage

Frontpage was bundled with certain editions of Office 2003 and is easy to use. It has the same layout to other office products and therefore is easy to learn. You can switch from the default design view to a code view easily. It has since been replaced by Microsoft Expression Web and Sharepoint Designer. If you already own a copy of Microsoft Office you may already have a copy of front page.

Reccommended for: Personal Sites, 1st websites.

Adobe Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver is an advanced web editor. It supports multipul web languages from HTML to visual basic. It can create dynamic websites, interacting with databases. Like frontpage is has the ability to switch between code view and a design view. It also adds another view which is a split between code and design. These features don’t come cheap and it is priced around $399

Nvu

Nvu is a free alternative to Frontpage and Dreamweaver and is avaliable on Windows, Mac and Linux. It is designed to be easy for novice users and requires not HTML skill. It includes a built in HTML validator to check HTML compliance.