Publish a Web Site

FrontPage 2003

Before you can put your site online, you will need to have a server that will "host" your web site.

Tip: Make a subweb
If you have an existing web site but don't want to replace it with your new web, you can make a subweb! For example, if your domain is www.yourcompany.com, but you are just testing your new web and don't want to overwrite anything on your existing domain, you can simply create a new folder - for example, www.yourcompany.com/mytestweb. Then publish your web to this location. No one else will know that it's there, but you can go to it online to view it and test it out.

Tip: Make a backup copy of your web site
Did you know that you can publish from a web server to your local computer? You can do this if your web server has FrontPage extensions. All you have to do is open your web live off the server, then set the "Remote Web Site" location to a folder on your computer. In this scenario, your local file folder acts as the "remote location," while your web server files, open in FrontPage, act as your "local location." FrontPage will take the files from your server and publish them to your computer. This is useful if you want to make a backup copy of your web site to your computer, or if changes have been made on the server and you want to "publish them back" to your local computer.

1. Open your web. Click the "Web Site" tab, then choose "Remote Web Site" from the bottom of the window.
   
   
    
2. The first time you publish, you'll have to set up the Remote Web Site Properties. Click the Remote Web Site Properties button that is at the top of the Remote Web Site panel.
3. You'll see several options for how to publish:
    
   • FrontPage or SharePoint Services - This is if you are publishing to a web server that supports FrontPage Server Extensions or SharePoint Services. You will then type your web URL - for example, http://www.yourcompany.com.
   • DAV - This is if you're publishing to a server that supports Distributed Authoring and Versioning.
   • FTP - If your web site does not have FP server extensions, you will most likely be using FTP. You will then type the ftp location. It may look something like ftp://www.yourhostingservice.com/yoursitefolder.
   • File System - This is if you're going to publish to a different folder on your computer or network. You may browse to the location or manually type in the path.

   There are two other tabs - one for optimizing HTML and one for Publishing options.
    

   • Optimize HTML
     This tab has different options that you may select which will take out certain types of code or spacing so that the web page's file size will be slightly smaller.
   • Publishing Options
     This tab allows you to choose whether or not you want to publish all files or only changed files, and also allows you to specify if you want to also publish subwebs or not.
      
4. Click "OK" to publish your web site. If you are publishing to a server, you may need to enter your username and password. If this is the first time you are publishing a web to this location, FrontPage will ask if it may create the files needed for a web. Click OK.
   
    
5. FrontPage will begin connecting to your location. When it's ready, you'll see both your local files as well as your "remote" folder.
   
   
    
6. Click the "Publish Web Site" button. FrontPage will then will begin copying the files over. You can view the status in the bottom section of the window.
   Note - If there are a number of people editing the web site, you may want to update your own local copy of the web site. You can choose to publish from "Remote to Local" or to "Synchronize" your remote and local web sites.