• This "Publishing a Web Site" tutorial is designed to assist you in uploading a web site from your local computer to your web server. Assuming your web host is using FrontPage Extensions, this is a very simple process.

Note: this tutorial is based on Microsoft FrontPage 2003.

• Free, nothing to purchase.

• < 10 Minutes

• Licensed copy of Microsoft FrontPage.

Publishing a web site is another name for uploading your web site to your hosting providers server. Once you create a local copy of the web site on your local computer and are happy with your work, the next step is to upload your html files and images to a server connected to the Internet. You can rent space on an Internet server through a seller called a web host. When using FrontPage make sure the web host you choose uses FrontPage Extensions or you won't have all the functionality native to FrontPage.

• The following procedures were tested with FrontPage 2003 which is purchased separately from the Office 2003 software suite. You can determine your version by opening Frontpage and clicking on Help > About Microsoft Office FrontPage.

1. Open FrontPage by double-clicking on the FrontPage icon located on your desktop or in your start menu (Start > Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003).
   
   
2. If you site doesn't preload, click on File > Open Site..., navigate to your site and click Open.
   
   
3. Once your site is open, click on File > Publish Site...
   
   
4. You will be presented with a "Remote Web Site Properties" dialog box. Assuming that your web host uses FrontPage Server Extensions, check the first option. The other options are explained below. Then enter the URL or your web site just as you would if you wanted to view the site in your browser.
   

• FrontPage Server Extensions or SharePoint Services: The FrontPage Server Extensions and SharePoint Services are server-based applications that extend the functionality available to FrontPage websites. They make publishing and updating your web site easier and allow you to use a variety of forms, hit counters, guestbooks, and more. If you are using FrontPage to build or maintain your web site, be sure that your web hosting provider offers FrontPage Extensions.
• WebDAV: stands for "Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning" and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol which allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers.
• FTP: stand for "File Transfer Protocol" and has been the standard method of transfering files to/from servers. When all else fails, FTP is a good choice to fall back on.
• File System: use this option if you want to publish your site to your local computer or a shared folder on your local network.
  
  OPTIONS:
  • Encrypted Connection required (SSL): Use this option if your web host is using Secure Sockets Layer (a protocol that transmits your communications over the Internet in an encrypted form). If unsure, leave unchecked.

5. The "Optimize HTML" tab provides you with a set of options to automatically clean up your HTML code while publishing. Setting these options should not affect the way your web site appears to your web visitors, it will only affect how your HTML code appears. Furthermore, FrontPage applies these settings only to the copies of the files that you publish to the remote Web site. It does not apply them to files in the local Web site. The purpose behind these options is to help reduce the size of those files in the remote Web site.
   The tab is divided into three section:
   

• The "Comments" section contains options for deleting HTML comments. Comments have nothing to do with the appearance of a web site and are only used to help the web site developer understand the layout of his/her code.
  • Author-time Web Component: comments that FrontPage uses to identify Web components for designing and editing Web pages, such as photo galleries or link bars.
  • Browse-time Web Component: comments that FrontPage uses to identify Web components that are available to site visitors, such as hit counters. [NOTE: This option is unavailable if the remote Web site is a location on your computer, a file server, or a server running FrontPage Server Extensions from Microsoft, SharePoint Team Services v1.0 from Microsoft, or Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services.]
  • Theme and Shared border: comments that FrontPage uses to identify themes and shared borders that you have applied. [NOTE: This option is unavailable if the remote Web site is a location on your computer, a file server, or a server running FrontPage Server Extensions from Microsoft, SharePoint Team Services v1.0 from Microsoft, or Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services.]
  • Dynamic Web Template: comments that identify regions that are available for editing in both Dynamic Web Templates and Web pages that are attached to those templates. This option also removes comments that specify which Dynamic Web Template a Web page is attached to.
  • Layout Tables and Cell Formatting: comments that FrontPage uses to identify layout tables and cells.
  • Script: comments in scripts— text that follows double slash marks (//) or text enclosed in asterisk-slash combinations (/* */).
  • All other HTML comments: text enclosed in the HTML comment delimiter <!-- -->— that do not apply to the types of elements above.
• The "Whitespace" section contains options for deleting spaces between HTML code that have no bearing on the appearance of the web site.
  • HTML leading: removes tabs and spaces from the beginning of each line of code.
  • HTML all: removes all white space from HTML code, including line breaks and white space between tag sets. [NOTE: this option does not apply to white space in scripts.]
• The "Generated HTML" section contains options for deleting HTML code automatically generated by FrontPage.
  • FrontPage Tracing Image and Interactive Button attributes: removes attributes that control the appearance of tracing images and Interactive Buttons in FrontPage.
  • Generator and ProgID tags: Removes metadata (<meta>) elements that store generator and program identifier metadata about Web pages.
• The "Set as default" button saves the current settings as the default settings for the remote Web site.
• The "Restore defaults" button restores the default settings you defined for the remote Web site.

6. The "Publishing" tab provides you with options to control how you would like your web site published to the Web server.
   
   This tab is divided into two sections - General and Logging:
   

• The "General" section contains two subsections to define which pages to publish and how FrontPage should make the determination if a web page has changed.
  • Publish: which files should be published...
    • Changed pages only: click this option to publish new files or files that have changed since they were last published.
    • All pages, overwriting pages already on destination: click this option to publish all files to the web server overwriting existing files that may already exist.
    • Include subsites: use this option to include any subsites that you may in your web site (a subsite is a subdirectory of a web site that is also a complete site).
  • Changes: how to tell which files have changed...
    • Determine changes by comparing source and destination files: this option compares the last changed and last published dates and times of files in the local Web site to the last changed dates and times of files in the remote Web site. [NOTE: use this option if you have multiple authors working from different computers]
    • Use source file timestamps to determine changes since last publish: this option compares only the last changed and last published dates and times of files in the local Web site.
• The "Logging" section records information about the publication process each time you publish. This information includes changes to files and folders in the remote site, the addition of files and folders to the remote site, events that occurred, and warnings.
  • If you have successfully published the site in the past, the "View log file" option will be available.

7. Once you click "OK" in the previous step you will be presented with a "Connect to" dialog box prompting you for a username and password. Enter these values according to what you received from your web host. If you are unsure what these values are, then contact your web host.
   
   
8. Once connected you will be presented with the publishing control panel. Your local site will be on the left and your remote web site on the right. The blue arrows next to the files in your local web site indicate which files FrontPage believes should be published based on the options you set previously in the "Publishing" tab. Note that there may be some pages that you may not want to publish. To publish only a few specific files, highlight the files you would like published (multiple files can be selected by using the <Ctrl> key while clicking with the left mouse button) and then click the blue arrow pointing to the right in the middle of the control panel. To publish all pages, click the "Publish Web site" button in the lower right corner of the control panel.
   
   • There are control buttons for your local and remote web site. The refresh button makes sure you are viewing the most up-to-date view of your pages (rather than a cached version). The up folder button allows you to navigate up one level (it is only shown if you are within a folder, otherwise it is greyed out). The delete button deletes the selected file.
   • Just above the "Publish Web site" button is a Synchronize radio button. You might consider using this if you have more than one author working on the web site and you want to update their changes to your local copy. By clicking the "Synchronize" radio button the most recently edited files will be synchronized between the web server and your local computer.
     
     
     
9. Once the publication process starts you should see a "Confirm Copy" dialog box showing the transfer of each file to be published.
   
   
   
10. You may receive a prompt asking if you would like to overwrite an exisiting file. You may choose:

• Yes to overwrite this file only
• Yes to All to overwrite this and any subsequent files
• No to cancel the publication of this file only
• No to All to cancel the publication of any subsequent file already present on the web server
• Cancel to cancel the publication process.
  
  

11. Upon completion of the upload FrontPage will return you to the publishing control panel. You can check the status indicator is the lower left hand section of the control panel to determine if the upload was successful.
    
    
    

The publish function iis just one of the many great tools FrontPage has to offer to make your web development easy. Our team have used numerous programs and they prefer the new FrontPage 2003 version over all the competition. For more information, check out Microsoft's web site:

Microsoft Office Frontpage 2003