Publish website

Time to publish?  If your website has been hard work, you'll feel a huge sense of relief when you finally send it off into the wild blue. (the World Wide Web)

Ask or beg your family and friends to give it a road test - to ensure that all the links are working and that there are no glitches or elements out of place. If you belong to a forum where people are making their own websites, ask them to test it for you. Check for deadlinks with this handy checker: http://www.dead-links.com/

How do I publish my site?
This depends on what software you have used to complete your site, and which web host you are using.

Automatic installers
Some web hosts come with automatic installers for certain software - such as Installatron and Fantastico.
With automatic installers, you install your software with a few mouse clicks. You can make your site visible or not visible to the public while you are setting your website up.

Hit the 'publish' button!
Yes, with some software, such as Swsoft Sitebuilder (when it comes included with hosting) and VodaHost's Blue Voda - you really do just click a publish button, and it is all done for you.
Some will publish your whole site every time. Blue Voda publishes one page at a time.

FTP
Some newbies will be scratching their heads when they first learn that they will need to ftp their site to their web host's server. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol.
You use an ftp client to transfer your files. There are many different clients available, both free and ones that you can buy.

Here is some information on FTP to read:

Tutorial:Introduction to FTP
http://www.elated.com/articles/introduction-to-ftp/

For Dreamweaver
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14787&sliceId=2



For those of you who would prefer to view video instructions, you could try searching youtube.com

Here is an example of a youtube video showing you how to download and use one of the free FTP clients (ftpsurfer)