Visualize Your Web Hosting©

Visualize Your Web Hosting©

I want you to VISUALIZE your web site. Or somebody else’s web site if you don’t have yours, yet.

I think that the reason that those of you who don’t yet have a web site don’t have one, yet, is because it sounds complicated. It’s not.

If you visualize a web site, it becomes much simpler. It becomes approachable. Once you visualize it it is easier to do it yourself. It’s easy, follow me, I’ll show you.

Where are your .doc (Word) documents?

On your computer, probably in My Documents folder.

Folders used to be called directories. Someone thought it would be easier for us to visualize directories if we thought of them as file folders. I think they were right. Another reason that I want you to visualize your web site.

Now you have probably created Word documents and saved them many times. Word put the document into your My Documents file. Word knew where to save it, how to save it and did it for you automatically! That’s the way things should work. If you want to see the letter that you wrote, you start Word and select the file and Word displays it for you. HTML documents work the same way just with different programs to create them and to display them.

Where are your .html documents (your web pages)?

On the webserver at your Hosting Company’s server Farm, right? Sure.

You use a program to create the document. Let’s say you chose Microsoft’s FrontPage, which is my favorite. So you start FrontPage, you create the web page and tell FrontPage to save it locally to your computer. FrontPage has a preference for the location to store these .htm or .html documents and that is in the My Webs folder which is inside your My Documents folder. Later, if you want to see it you can start FrontPage, look at Recent Files, as you probably do in Word and open the web page again in FrontPage.

But, you can also open that web page in your Web Browser (Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is the most popular). If you start IE (Internet Explorer) and type the location of the web page in the address box, it will open it and display it as a web page.

Now IE doesn’t care where the document is – local or online- you just tell it the location and Bingo! it loads a copy into memory and displays it on your monitor.

What’s a web page.

Just a document with a .htm or .html extension like hello.htm or hello.html. In the days of DOS, you could only have 8.3 names. That is 8 characters in the first part and 3 in the part after the period which is called the file extension. We have now overcome that limitation and can have more characters in the name and the extension. I recommend you get used to the .htm and always use it as the extension for all your web pages. If you use .html and try to display it by typing only .htm, you will get an error!

The .htm document is written with “tags” which are ways of “coding” into the .htm document instructions telling Web Browsers how to display the text which is between the beginning tag and the ending tag. Whether the text is bold or red or centered or whatever. Many html editors will not require that you know this code. They will create it for you based on the way you type it into that editor. If you put in centered, red, bolded text, it will automatically add the appropriate tags when it creates the .htm document.

By the way, there is plenty of code in Word documents also to tell Word how to display the document. To see some, when you have a Word document open, press and hold CTRL and SHIFT keys and press the 8 key (the one with the asterisk *). Do that again to get rid of them.

But back to .htm documents. They exist as plain text documents which don’t have all the formatting information like Word. They are simpler. The tags are visible in plain text also. <HTML> is the start tag and </HTML> is the end tag. Everything between those tags is formatted according to that tag.

Graphics and Pictures

If there are graphics, pictures on the web page the you will see code like this

In this case, the image is obtained from the source location and displayed by the browser.

So for text and graphics the browser goes to the location of the web page it loads a copy into your computers memory, and displays it in your Browser window in much the same way that Word would do for a letter. Each web page is another .html document. So if you have 12 web pages on a web site, there are 12 html documents on the webserver. In addition, if there are images, the usual way would be to have the image files, such as logo.gif above on your webserver.

So all in all it’s easy to think of your web site as a group of files in a folder on a computer somewhere else. That’s really your web site. Just a group of files on the webserver.

While the number of steps involved for that file to get to the person over the Internet are many, involving many pieces of hardware and software, it works! And it all works automatically. You ask to see http://mywebsite.com/index.html or c:\mywebsite.com\index.html in your browser and the browser finds the file and displays it for you. They will be displayed identically. The file that the first displays resides on a webserver at your hosting company the other one is on your local computer.

It is really this simple.

A visitor simply enters your website address into his browser and in a few seconds, the page, the .html document is shown on his computer. You created the web page, sent it to your webserver and from there it is available for others to view.

Use the new version of FrontPage 2003

Microsoft has available a trial edition of FrontPage 2003. You can get it for $7.95, shipping and handling here http://www.microsoft.com/office/frontpage/prodinfo/trial.mspx

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View the html code for any web page

You can see this code on any webpage that displays in your browser by right-clicking the web page and choosing View Source from the popup menu. More email is being sent in html format. If you right click on an email and get that popup menu, it is in html format and you can view the source the same way that you view the source of a web page. But email is another story.

Backup your website.

But your web host does that for you! Yes but what if the backup failed?

Another copy of it on your computer is easy, so do it. It also gives you a way to make changes to your site and see how it works, by changing the copy on your computer. You can make it behave as it does on the webserver. See if everything works ok, then, if it does, you Publish your website from your computer to the webserver.

Most of the time you can make minor changes directly on the webserver with no problems. But at that point the copies that exist online and on your computer are different. Maybe it is unimportant and you just don’t care. OK, fine. But if you have changed the name of a document or if you have changed a link, look out! It may create a problem later and you will not remember doing it and you won’t know what went wrong. I’ve had it happen many times and most of the time, I am the problem.

Having two, different copies of the same subject is not good. So just do this, whenever you are making changes to your website, online, at the webhost or local, on your computer. When you finish publish the website to the other location. That makes both of them the same. Now there is less chance of a problem, less chance of error. See the article complete with screen shots here

http://dollarware.us/websitebackup.htm

You might not know how to make a file(s) available for download on your website.

One little task which puzzled me for quite a while and one for which I had difficulty finding the answer to was: How to Put a File on Your Website and set it up so that a visitor could easily download it.

The problem was, I think, that it was too easy. Those who knew how assumed everyone else knew also.

OK, all you have to do is to create a .zip file containing the file or files that you want to make available.

Get an evaluation version of WinZip which will zip or compress the files and will them unzip or de compress the files at http://winzip.com

The next step is simply create a hyperlink to the file name on a webpage (or even in an email). When someone clicks on the link, the download will begin immediately. That's it, just create the hyperlink to a .zip file, make a hyperlink to it, no other setup. It's built into the browser and/or operating system.

Questions, let me know what you don’t understand.

John

johnwilson@starband.net