Web Design CourseWeek 8: Posting Web Pages on the Internet |
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Well, you’ve learned a lot so far in this course. And last week, you completed your very own customized Web page. Way to go! Although you can now design Web pages, you may have noticed that there is one very important missing piece. Right now, the only people who can view your Web pages are people who have access to your ILP network drive. That means you and your advisor. Of course, the benefit of being able to create Web pages is that anyone on the Internet can view them. This week, you will learn how to post Web pages on the Internet. After this week, not only your advisor, but also your family, your friends and your long lost cousins in Italy and Australia will be able to view your Web pages! Pretty exciting, don’t you think?
This will be a very different week in the Web Design course. Up until now, you’ve been learning new tags and attributes and designing pages each week. This week, we will not introduce one single tag. Believe it or not, you will not create any new pages, either. Your goal this week is to post a Web page on the Internet.
What do I need to post Web pages on the Internet?
You will need two things to post pages on the Internet:
- Space on a Web server
- A program that allows you to post pages to the Web server using FTP.
Let’s learn a little about each one:
The Web Server
In Week 1 of this course, we learned that when we view information in a document transferred over the Web, the information that we view is called a Web page. We also learned that the computer that lets us view the Web page is called the Web server, and our computer is called the Web client, since it is viewing the page. The computer that you are using right now is a Web client. It is what is allowing you to view this Web page. If you want others to be able to view a Web page that you created, you need to transfer the Web page from your computer to a Web server. In short, a Web server contains a copy of your Web pages that others can view from anywhere on the Internet.
There are two ways that you can post your pages to a Web server:
- Use your own computer as a Web server.
- Transfer your pages to somebody else’s Web server.
In this course, we are not going to learn how to use our own computers as Web servers. You can learn how to do it, but it would take a powerful computer, a number of software licenses, and the knowledge of operating a server. This is beyond the scope of this course, and it can be very expensive.
Using space on somebody else’s server is what most people choose to do. It’s much easier than running your own Web server, and it’s relatively inexpensive. In fact, some companies will let you use their Web servers for free, which is what we will be doing in this course.
What is FTP?
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is the simplest and most secure way to exchange files over the Internet. Whether you know it or not, you most likely use FTP all the time.
The most common use for FTP is to download files from the Internet. Whenever you download any file from the Internet, you are using FTP. When downloading a file, you're actually transferring the file to your computer from another computer over the Internet. This is why the T (transfer) is in FTP. You may not know the actual location of the computer that you are downloading from, but you definitely know the URL, and that is all you need to complete the download.
FTP is at the heart of the MP3 and ITunes music craze, and vital to most online auction and game enthusiasts. In this course, we will use FTP to upload your files to a Web server. To do this, you will need a program that makes this easy for you to do.
When uploading files using FTP, you will most likely use an FTP address. An FTP address looks a lot like the URLs that you are used to seeing, except it uses the prefix ftp:// instead of http://.
Example HTTP address: http://www.sonic.com
Example FTP address: ftp://ftp.sonic.com
Now that you know a little about Web servers and FTP, it’s time to choose one of the many options that are available to you to post your Web pages on the Internet.
