Hour4.Publishing Your HTML Pages

Hour 4. Publishing Your HTML Pages

Here it is, the hour you've been waiting for! Your web pages are ready for the world to see, and this hour explains how to get them to appear before the eyes of your intended audience, whether it's your circle of friends or co-workers, or the entire online world.

The most obvious avenue for publishing web pages is, of course, the Internet, but you may want to limit the distribution of your pages to a local intranet within your organization instead of making them available to the general public. You may also choose to distribute your web pages on CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, USB memory cards, or even good old-fashioned floppy disks. This hour covers all of these options and offers advice for designing your pages to work best with whichever distribution method you choose.

An intranet is a private network with access restricted to one organization, but which uses the same technical standards and protocols as the global public Internet.

Try It Yourself

Before you read about publishing your pages, you should give some thought to which methods of distribution you will be using:

• If you want your pages to be visible to as many people as possible all over the world, Internet publishing is a must. However, don't rule out other distribution methods; you can easily adapt Internet-based pages for distribution on disks or local networks.
  
  
• If you want to reach only employees of your organization, publish on your local intranet only.
  
  
• If you want to provide very large graphics, multimedia, or other content that would be too slow to transfer over even a cable or DSL modem connection, consider publishing on a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. You can easily offer the CD-ROM from your web site to people who find you through the Internet but want the full experience. Of course, these days you'd really have to design a hog of a web site for it to require a CD-ROM, especially when you look around and see how much multimedia some sites are using.
  
  
• If you plan to make a presentation at a meeting and would also like to publish related material on the Internet or an intranet, why not use HTML instead of old-fashioned PowerPoint slides as a visual aid? You can even place the files on a memory card or burn one-off CD-ROMs if necessary for people to take home.