BestAddress HTML editor: Publishing website on Internet enables people to access web sites

Publishing Website on Internet

Once you have completed your website, you will probably want to make it available on the Internet for the world to see.

Making your Website Available to Others

So that your website can be accessed by people on the Internet, you will need to have it hosted on a special type of computer called a server. Servers "serve" data to other computers when they request it.

There are four ways that you can have your website hosted: using your existing Internet Service Provider, using a free hosting provider, hosting it on your computer’s network or signing up with a commercial hosting provider.

1. Most Internet Service Providers offer to host their customer’s websites as part of their Internet access account free of charge. However, this usually only applies to personal websites and not commercial ones.
2. There are a few hosting providers who will host your website free of charge. However, they do place advertising throughout your site which in turn pays for its hosting.
3. If your company has a web server, contact your system administrator and find out if your website can be hosted on it.
4. The final option is to use a commercial hosting provider. It is the most expensive choice (other than hosting the website yourself) and usually requires a setup fee followed by monthly payments.
   

When choosing your hosting provider, there are a number of factors that you will need to take into account:

1. Storage space provided: For a simple website, such as one for a small business, that contains only a few pages and graphics, 5 to 20MB would usually be sufficient. If, however, your website contains large images, videos, audio files, computer programs or any other large files for visitors to download, you might need to consider a hosting account that offers more storage space.
2. Bandwidth: Most hosting providers place a limit on the amount of data that can be downloaded by your page’s visitors each month. If visitors to your site download more than you expected, you will have to pay for the excess.
3. Email Accounts: If you have a domain name for your site (you will learn about these in the next section), you will probably want matching email addresses (such as "info@mywebsite.com"). Consider the number of email accounts provided with your hosting option and whether messages sent to them are stored in individual accounts or simply forwarded to an account specified by you.

Domain Names

Domain names are not required to host a website but do provide an easy method for people to recognise your site’s address. A typical domain name is a word consisting of either letters or numbers followed by .com, .net, .org .biz or one of many other extensions.

Domain names need to be registered with a registration authority. The costs vary depending on the authority you choose and the type of domain name you are registering.

Your domain name is what people will locate and recognise you by. It is for this reason that you should choose one that is easy for people to remember, hard to misspell and easy to type.

Although most domain names chosen are the identical name of the company (without the spaces), it might not always be appropriate. A complex name or one longer than 10 characters is often easy to misspell. Your company's name might consist of more than one word. When put together, the last character of the first word and the first character of the second word may be identical characters. Chances are that people will only type one letter, missing the one for the next word. In either case, consider using an abbreviated form or a different (but recognisable) name.

Preparing Your Page for Publication

Once you have set up an account with a hosting provider, there are a few things you will need to do before you can unload your website. When working with BestAddress, files and hyperlinks are referred to with their full file name on your computer. When you publish your website on the Internet, the address for all your files obviously changes. For example, a file named "C:\My Documents\Website\products\product1.html" on your computer may be named "http://www.mywebsite.com/products/product.html" in your website. To change the addresses in all your webpages in preparation for publication, first copy them to a new folder (you might need to go back to their original state later when you update your site). Open the webpages in BestAddress. From the Edit menu choose Change Root Directory. In the Local Directory box, type the name of the directory where the files are stored and in the Internet Directory box type the Internet address that corresponds to it. The screen shot below demonstrates this using the earlier example:

Make sure that all the files referred to in your webpage actually exist in the directory containing your website. In addition, you will also need to make sure that all files in your website do not contain spaces to reduce the risk of errors occurring when the website is accessed.

Once all the hyperlinks are up to date, do a syntax check of your pages to make sure you haven’t made a coding mistake anywhere by choosing Check Syntax from the Tools menu.

The Default Webpage

You will need to specify which one of your webpages should be the website’s home page. A home page is the webpage that is returned to a visitor if they only type your website’s URL without knowing the name of a specific HTML document. For example, typing "http://www.mywebsite.com/" could return a list of files stored in your website’s root directory or even worse, return an error. Most hosting providers usually require the home page to be named "index.html". If you need to change it, make sure that all your website’s hyperlinks refer to the new name.

Transferring your Site

If your site is to be stored on your computer network, it is simply a matter of copying over the required files to the directory set up by the system administrator. Otherwise, you will need to send the files to your hosting provider. Your hosting provider will give you details on your website’s address along with access passwords and any other relevant information. Many hosting providers allow you to send files to your site from their own website. If they do not provide this service, you will need to use an FTP program to do it for you. You can launch an FTP program from BestAddress by choosing Publish Files on the Internet from the File menu. For more detailed instructions, please consult the relevant online help file.

Advertising your Website

Once your website is on the Internet and you have made sure everything works correctly, you will need to make sure that people can visit it. As well as providing its address on letter heads, business cards and other correspondences, you will need to have it hosted on search engines. If you visit the major search engines, you can usually "submit your site".