While browsing some blogs to find some info about website creation, I ran across this post in Dave Nicholson’s blog. It gives an excellent tutorial on exactly how to FTP using a program called SmartFTP. Even tells you where to get it for free!
FTP’ing is a means of uploading your files or getting your webpages sent to your webhosts server.
While there are many different ftp programs available to use to do the job, most of them work in a similar manner to accomplish what you need done. This is an easy step-by-step fast read that you could apply to pretty much any FTP program you use.
To get your website homepage as well as all the other pages for your website onto the internet (AKA uploaded to the web), you’ll need a software program that handles just such tasks. This is called an FTP Program. File Transfer Protocal.
It doesn’t take much to learn how to use this much needed piece of software. It basically has a bunch of boxes on one screen that you use to “move” your files to and from. The stuff on the left are the files & folders that are on your home computer. The stuff on the right is what is on your webhosting companies computer. You drag & drop from left to right. Simple as that, then your website is online & live!
Filezilla and coreftp are popular and free FTP programs to use. Any FTP program usually comes with help guides, and are pretty much self explanatory on how to use.
Depending on the speed of your internet connection and size of your webpages, depends on how long the FTP program will take to upload your webpages. If you have a lot of graphics / images, those take a lot longer to upload than do text webpages.
For this website you are reading, success or not, I am uploading the pages one by one, since I am showing you step by step on how to make a website. For your own websites, however, you will more than likely make the entire website before you upload it. In that case, you can just drag the one folder that has your entire site in it, to your webhosts computer. In one shot, it will start transferring it, which means you can just temporarily walk away from your computer & come back later when its done.
The FTP program is a simple tool that is no where as cool as some of the scripts that you can install on your websites, but it is a necessary tool.
