New web-site question?

[BRL]

Hi all. I am very tempted to get my own web-site domain. I read on here recently that you can pick one up for as little as £19 for two years. Now, I fancy that so what i need to know is how do i upload things onto it? If i want to put up pictures and a bit of text what do i use?. I have microsoft front-page, so if i make a web page, how do i get it onto my space? :confused: :confused:
Any info, tips etc on how its all done will be appreciated.

[expedite_climb]

BRL,

You can do it a lot cheaper than that if you wish.

You can get .co.uk or .org.uk for around £7.50 for 2 years, or a .me.uk for £12.50 Others are more expensive such as .com for £25.

Interestingly www.brl.me.uk is still available.

That is not the end of the story. You will need a hosting package. You can set your domain to forward to a freebie such as freeserve or BTopenworld or whatever. You can set it up so that the end user cant tell that it is hosted as such too.

Otherwise youll be paying more than £35 per annum, but will get better features such as ASP and cgi, as well as more reliability. (Your site will be in a secure compound, backup power etc.).

As for uploading your files, you need a piece of software to do FTP. I use Smart FTP (http://www.smartftp.com/) which is basically a bit like windoze explorer, and you just drag and drop the files across.

Any q's drop me a PM as I do professional web design / hosting etc.

One word of caution, chances are you will have to pay extra to have "Frontpage extensions" on your website, and as such many of the functions you may use in front page (such as page counters it makes), will be unavailable until you add this.

(They can be done other ways!)

[RomeoTangoFoxtrotMike]

BRL,

read on here recently that you can pick one up for as little as £19 for two years
You should be able to get them cheaper than that, however, you should check in the Small Print for the charges/conditions they impose in the event that you want to move your domain elsewhere. Reputable companies won't even charge -- others do, and sometimes take ages to process the request. An absolute nightmare if you aren'ta happy with the service your're getting, for some reson.

As to how you upload, that very much depends on what "facilities" the service provider gives you. At the most basic, you will get something called "FTP" (File Transfer Protocol [sic]), a clunkly command line version of which comes built-in to Windows. You can pick up a much better FTP client off the 'net, if that's all your SP provides.

Your hosting company may also provide webforms which will allow you to upload stuff into the appropriate place. It varies quite a lot from provier to provider, but they should give you clear-ish instructions :)

Get back to me if you need any more help.

[ Hehe, my post and EC's crossed :) ]

[BRL]

Thanks chaps. I have just paid a tenner for a me.uk address. All i have to do now is find it and put something on there. :confused:

[BRL]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I take it 'front page extensions' are to do with the MS frontpage thingy?:confused:

[djk]

BRL

There are numerous FTP clients available ranging from the basic ftp command in DOS to programs such as terrapin FTP, Cute FTP, Smart FTP. just practice with a few of them to see which one you feel comfortable with.

[RomeoTangoFoxtrotMike]

You may want to bear in mind that, while FrontPage make life easy for the page creator, some of its functions generate web pages that don't view well on non-Microsoft browsers (surprise, surprise ;) ) Now at the risk of starting a religious war :), although the majority of people will being a Micro$oft browser (Internet Explorer), many will not (Opera, Netscape/Mozilla, Dillo, Lynx), and your web pages may not display as well on these browsers if you use some of these features...

So much for Tim Berners-Lee's dream of a non-proprietry markup language which could be viewed by any browser... :rolleyes: (http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/)

[djk]

RTFM,

yes, of course. Lynx is a text only browser :D
it's probably best when designing a website just to really aim for the two most popular used ones, Netscape and IE and not worry about the rest.

[BRL]

Right then. I have my domain, I even have some web-space and I can easily 'upload' things now. Problem is this. When I upload a page (done with ms frontpage) it looks like this...

Index of /~***
Parent Directory
1.htm

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stronghold/2.4.2 Apache/1.3.6 C2NetEU/2410 Server at www.*****.com Port 80

How do I get the page to display the main page as I want it and not like it says above???? :confused:

[Tinstaafl]

Rename the file as 'index.htm' might help.

Most browsers look for that as the first page on a site.

Unless you point them directly to a particular file, that is.

[Devils Advocate]

Also, if your site has pages that are located within subfolders / sub-directories, be sure to ensure that you always have a 'blank' web page ( called: index.htm ) with the subdirectory - that way somebody who views your website will not stumble across all the file in the subdirectory, as they will always be presented with the page that's provided by the index.htm file that lives within the folder.

Why ?

Well basically it's because the default behaviour of a web server is always to firstly try to deliver a file called index.htm, and if it can't do that it'll instead attempt to show a directory file contents listing........