Keeping Your Web Site Fresh

Stagnant Web sites are as appealing as day-old pastry. With doughnuts and Web pages, freshness counts-so keep your site vital by changing its content, updating its graphics, and adding new features regularly.

To update your site (or to correct any mistakes you find), you make changes on the local copy of your Web site and then publish the Web site again. To update the site's changed pages, a single button-click does the trick:

1. In Expression Web, open the Web site you want to update, and make (and save) whatever changes you want.

2. Activate your Internet connection.

3. Choose File Publish Site.

4. If necessary, reenter your username and password.

   Note 

   If you update your site several times during a single Expression Web session, this dialog box appears only the first time you publish or update the site.

   The dialog box closes, and Expression Web copies the changed pages to the host Web server. Your site is now fresh as a daisy.

If you prefer to choose which pages and files to update (as opposed to letting Expression Web simply publish all files that have changed), here's the procedure:

1. In the Folder List task pane, right-click the file or folder you want to publish, and then right-click the selection.

   Tip 

   You can select multiple files and folders by pressing the Ctrl key while clicking icons.

2. Choose Publish Selected Files from the pop-up menu that appears.

   The Remote Web Site Properties dialog box appears with the site's publishing address visible in the Remote Web Site Location text box.

3. Click OK to close the dialog box and publish the selected files.

To republish the entire Web site (not just the changed pages) or to publish the Web site to a different location, follow the steps in the earlier section "Publishing your Web site."

Tip 

If you want to know about what kind of visitors you're getting and how many, check with your Web hosting service. Most services offer detailed reports on all your stats.