Learn how to publish your website

Publishing your Website

Once you create your web site, you have to publish it by putting the entire HTML and the graphic files on the web server that will host your site. Everyone on the internet will be able to access the site after that. In the process of building your site, you may want to publish your site regularly to make the latest versions of your pages accessible to the web. There are editor programs available to publish your pages. There is a free program called WS_FTP LE that is pretty good. The professional version can be purchased if you need more features.

Develop On Your Own Hard Drive

Do your developments on your hard drive so that no one else can see it. Repair your mistakes, clean up your pages and when ready, publish it.

Relocation to another Web Server

Once in a while the web site is shifted to another server. It is imperative to notify everybody of the new URL or else people will keep accessing the old site. You can modify the old site to notify the visitors of the new URL. If the visitors have a newer browser, to inform them to automatically transfer the visitors to the new site with the insertion of a refresh meta tag in the home page of the old site The refresh meta tag goes in the XHTML header of the home page, and it looks like the following - all one line.

The integer 0 in the content argument is a relative time-delay. Increase the value of that number to keep the announcement displayed longer before the relocation to the new site occurs. (The URL in the tag shown above is an example; in your case it is the URL of your new site.)

If visitors enter your site directly, you can insert the refresh meta tag in the headers of the pages through which they might enter your site. If Unix server is hosting your old site, it can be told to redirect all htm or html files to the home page of the site (you will then only need to redirect the home page).