Web Design All-in-One for Dummies®

Chapter 20. Publishing Your Site

In This Chapter

• Finding out about FTP programs

• Establishing a remote connection

• Testing files in a test directory

• Transferring files with FTP

• Publishing your site

It's finally time to publish your site! At this stage, you have done quite a bit of work. You've planned, organized, and gathered information for your site; designed a mock-up; optimized all the graphics; built out all the pages; tested and validated an entire Web site; and registered a domain and secured a hosting plan. Now you are truly ready, at long last, to share your site with the world. To officially publish your site and get it online for all to see, you need to transfer all the files that make up the site — that is, all the HTML files, images, CSS, external JavaScript files, SSIs, media files, and any other documents for files that are accessible through the site — to the remote server that is hosting the site.

If you have registered a domain but have not secured a hosting plan, now is the time to do that and put in for the DNS transfer because you'll need the hosting plan to be up and running before you can transfer files to the server. Otherwise, if the hosting plan is ready, go dig up the information the host provider sent to you that shows the plan's username and password and includes any special instructions about FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and transferring files to the host's remote server. FTP is the most common way to transfer files to a remote server, so that's what I discuss ...