Publishing Your First Web Page

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Written by Colin Welch – 13.03.09

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Part 1.3: Publishing Your First Web Page

Before you do anything else; you will need to publish your first Web Page to your web host. You will now learn how to transfer your web page and its associated files to your web host so that the page becomes “live” on the Internet. All this is covered in our comprehensive Dreamweaver training course.

How to Publish Your Web Page Using Dreamweaver

1: Start up Site Manager by clicking “Site > Manage Sites…” from the menu. A dialog box entitled “Manage Sites” should open, with your website’s name highlighted in the box in the main part of the window. Click the “Edit…” button.

2: Click the “Next” button until you arrive at the screen with the following question: “How do you connect to your remote server?”
Select “FTP”. Once this has been selected, additional questions will need to be answered.

• “What is the hostname or FTP address of your Web Server?”
• “What folder on the server do you want to store your files in?”
• “What is your FTP login?”
• “What is your FTP password?”

3: This information was provided when you first signed up for a web hosting account.
Your “FTP address” or File Transfer Protocol address is the way in which you transfer your web pages from your own computer to your web host’s computer. This is known as “uploading” or “publishing”.

4: Type the FTP address into the field “What is the hostname or FTP address of your Web Server?”

5: The next question: “What folder on the server do you want to store your files in?” Your files cannot be put into any folder on the web server. You can place your web pages in a folder called “www” or “public_html”. Although others say that you should place them in the default directory that you see when you connect by FTP.

If your web host tells you to upload the files when you connect via FTP, leave the box blank. Otherwise if they tell you that you need to publish your files in a “www” directory or some other folder name, enter in the box given. If the host does not mention this at all, you can leave the box blank.

6: Type your FTP user name into the “What is your FTP login?” field.

7: Enter your FTP password into the “What is your FTP password?” field. If you don’t want to have to keep entering your password every time you publish a page, leave the “Save” checkbox activated (it automatically becomes checked when you type your password). If you are sharing your computer with others, and don’t want Dreamweaver to save your password, click the check mark to uncheck it.

8: If your web host tells you that the information you entered above is for SFTP or “Secure FTP”, click the “Use Secure FTP (SFTP)” checkbox. Otherwise leave it blank.
(Note: if you check the secure FTP option, make sure you double check the information provided by your web host to ensure that the default folder to publish your files is still the same. Some web hosts log you in to a different folder when you connect by SFTP from the one you get when you connect by FTP. You may have to adjust the folder name to account for this if you use the SFTP option. In general, if you are confused or not sure, just leave the box unchecked to use normal FTP.)

9: Click the “Test Connection” button to check that you have entered all the information correctly.
Note: If using Windows Vista, the Windows firewall may display a message asking you to block or unblock the connection. Click the “Unblock” button, or you’ll be blocking FTP connections for Dreamweaver. The interference by the firewall may also cause your first test in Dreamweaver to fail, leading Dreamweaver to issue a dialog box telling you to use Passive connections. Just click OK, and click the “Test Connection” again.
If the “Test Connection” button fails, Dreamweaver will display a dialog box asking you to try connecting with Passive FTP. To do this, look at the top of the dialog box to locate the “Advanced” tab. Click it. Somewhere in the middle of the page is a checkbox for “Use passive FTP”. Click the box to activate it. Then click the “Basic” tab at the top of the dialog box again, to return you to the wizard view. Finally, click the “Test Connection” button again.
If the test continues to fail, it is possible that you have entered some information incorrectly.
If the test succeeds, click the “Next” button until you reach the final Summary page. Then click the “Done” button. Do not click the Cancel button for a shortcut out of this dialog box or you may have to re-enter everything you typed in earlier.

10: Click “Done” again to dismiss the “Manage Sites” dialog box.

11: Then click “Site > Put” to publish your web page.
You might receive a message from Dreamweaver asking you whether it should “Put dependent files?” Click “Yes”. This means it is uploading things like your images and CSS files that are required by your web pages.

You have now published your first web page.

Similar resources you may like

1. Building a Basic Web Page With Dreamweaver
2. Testing Your Web Page
3. Adding a logo to your Website
4. Adding Other Images to your Web Page
5. Making a text link on your Web Page

Tags

Dreamweaver, dreamweaver cs4, dreamweaver tutorial, ftp, Publish Your Web Page, Web Page

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