Beginning Web Programming with HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Second Edition

Chapter 13. Putting Your Site on the Web

Once you've created your web site, you'll want to make it available for everyone to see. In this final chapter, you are going to look at how you prepare your site for, and move it onto, the Web. You will also look at how you can help encourage visitors to come to your site.

Web sites live on special computers called web servers that are constantly connected to the Internet. Rather than buying and running your own web server, it's generally far more economical to rent space on a web server owned by a hosting company. And in order to help you choose the right hosting company and, indeed, the right package from a hosting company, you need to learn the key terminology used by these companies. In this chapter, you will find out what things like shared and dedicated hosting are, how to decide how much space or bandwidth you need, and so on.

But before you put your site on a web server, you should perform some checks and tests, from validating your documents and checking links to making sure the site works in different screen resolutions, and that the text is readable. Putting a site on the Web only to have customers tell you that the link to the products page does not work or that they cannot see the site on their computer will not enhance your reputation. So you must learn how to test your site before it goes live. And then once you have put your site on a web server, you can perform other kinds of checks and tests—after all, while a site can seem ...