|
To many people
the concept of how a website is completely beyond them,
preferring to think that it works by magic pixie dust. In
reality it's very simple, once you have got website hosting
sorted your website will be set up to 'live' on a computer
which is located in a big warehouse filled from top to
bottom with other computers. The key difference between the
computer you are using at the moment and the computer (which
is called a server) in the warehouse (which is called a
datacenter) is that people are allowed to access the server
to retrieve files but they are not allowed to access your
computer (unless you have a virus or have given them
permission).
So you can
think of your website as just being located on a different
computer owned by your website hosting company that you
connect to through the Internet. Now, to put the files from
your computer on to the server you need to use something
called an FTP program, if you are really interested, FTP
stands for File Transfer Protocol). It basically lets you
copy files from your home computer to the computer thousands
of miles away which has your website on it. If you can copy
and paste a file on your own computer, then you have all the
skills necessary to copy files to your website.
First of all
you need to choose an FTP program. I personally use AceFTP
because it's free, other people like to use CuteFTP and
there's another free option called Filezilla. However, they
all work in the same way and if you can use one, you can use
them all. If you ask your website hosting company they might
even recommend an alternative.
In order to
copy files to your website you need to make a connection to
the server. Many of you will be familiar with entering a
username and password to login to a work computer or even
your home computer and connecting to the server is no
different, it must authenticate you to give you permission
to access the files. Your website hosting company will
provide you with all the login details necessary, if they
don't, just contact them and ask for the FTP information for
your site and they will point you in the right direction.
For reference, these are the details you will need to
connect to your website:
The way most
FTP programs are set up is that your window will be divided
vertically. On the left you have your computer and on the
right you have the server where your website is located.
Once you have entered the details above and connected to
your server the list of files and folders will display on
the right hand side of the FTP program.
In order to
copy your files to the right location, you have to know in
which folder to copy them. If your website hosting company
uses the popular cPanel software (and most hosting companies
do) then you need to find the “public_html” folder and open
it by double clicking it, just like you do on your home
computer. If you want to upload a file called about.html and
you wanted to have it display when someone went to
example.com/about.html then you would upload the about.html
file in to the public_html folder.
To upload the
file you can literally drag and drop it from the left side
(your computer) to the right side (the server) of your
screen. Alternatively you can copy the file (CTRL-C) on your
computer, select the location where you want it to go on the
server and then paste it (CTRL-V).
You can perform
virtually all the file management tasks on the files on the
server as you can on your home computer, so you can copy and
paste, move, delete, rename etc
FTP and
transferring files to your website isn't half as scary as it
sounds, it's exactly the same as moving files on your home
computer but connecting to another computer over the
Internet via a program and doing it remotely.
|
