Publishing Your Web Pages

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The last stage of Web page creation entails publishing your Web pages. After you create and save your Web page documents, you're ready to publish your pages for the world (or at least your fellow employees) to see. Publishing your Web pages simply means copying your Web page files and folders from your computer onto a Web server. Keep in mind that when you publish your Web pages, you must retain the hierarchical structure of your Web page files, including naming and organizational schemes. If your Web page stores all its graphics files in a subfolder, for example, you must publish the subfolder in addition to the contents of the folder without changing the name of the folder or files. (Remember, changing uppercase to lowercase constitutes changing a file's or folder's name.)

The most common way to publish Web pages is to copy the files and folders on your system to a server by using a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) application. When you create Web pages in Word, you have another option. You can save your Web page documents to a server by clicking the My Network Places button in the Save As dialog box and saving your Web page documents in a folder on your network location.

Whenever you publish Web pages, you should always view your live pages immediately after you upload them—that way, you'll be the first to see whether your pages are displayed properly. If your pages need to be fixed, change the local copy of your Web page document, and then save the updated file over the existing file on your Web server. After your Web pages are uploaded and live, you're ready for the next stage of Webmastering—maintaining and updating your Web site. (But that's a topic for another book!)