Publish your web pages

After you create your web pages on your computer, you must put them on a web server if you want others to be able to view them. Often, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) will provide free web space on their server for their subscribers.

You will need to know the following information:

  1. Name of the web server computer (or "host"). Sometimes, it is the same as in the web page address, that is www.your-isp.com.
  2. Your user ID, jneuhaus in my case.
  3. Your password.
  4. The directory where you put your web pages. Often, it is your home directory and you will be in the right directory when you login.

Use an FTP client to put a copy of your pages on the web server. On the Mac, my favorite FTP program is Fetch. For Windows, use FTP Commander, WS_FTP, Windows Commander or the built-in FTP client that can be run from the command line. These and other programs can be downloaded from www.tucows.com. In Linux, run "ftp" from the command line. (If you are an AOL member using AOL to host your web pages, you must connect to AOL using the AOL software. You can use the AOL software to put the pages.)

Put the pages on the web server and then view them with your web browser.

Most web servers deliver, by default, a file called index.htm or index.html when a browser requests a directory name and does not specify a file name. For example, these web addresses will deliver the same page:

If you want people to find your page in the search engines, register it on their "Add URL" pages:
John Neuhaus, john at jneuhaus.com, Friday, August 9, 2002