Hosting Your Website

If at all possible, it is best for you to publish your work to the World Wide Web. This will make it easy for you to submit assignments to the instructor (all you have to send is the address or URL), as well as share your work with other students. In addition, it will allow you see your sites as your students will see them.

How do you do that? There are several possibilities. One limiting factor might be that some features of FrontPage require the server that hosts the site to be running the FrontPage Server Extensions. These are free programs that Microsoft provides for all the major Web server programs. If they have not been installed, FrontPage features that require server processing will not work. The list of such features includes

bulletThe Discussion Web
bulletThe Guest Book Page
bulletHit Counters
bulletForms Processing (e.g. emailing form data or storing it in a text file)
bulletand others.

If you do not use such features, then you have a much wider choice of servers.

Where to Find a Web Server

There are many places that provide free Web space. If you are willing to pay for Web space your chance of finding a server that runs the FrontPage Server Extensions increases greatly.

Among the free or very low cost possibilities are

bulletThe Instructional Technology student server at Kent State ($10 per year for 100 megabytes). Sign up on the second floor of White Hall at KSU. It has the FrontPage Server Extensions.
bulletThe KSU Personal Web Server. If you have a Kent State email account then you can use this server for free. It does not have the FrontPage Server Extensions. Go to http://www.personal.kent.edu/~labwork/web_page/
bulletYour Internet Services Provider (ISP). Most ISPs (including AOL, Earthlink, Roadrunner, etc.) provide a few Megabytes of Web space for their subscribers. See their websites for information about using it. The ISPs only rarely provide the FrontPage Server Extensions. A few megabytes will be plenty for your projects for this workshop.
bulletFree sites such as GeoCities, Tripod, and so on. These organizations provide free hosting services, but usually place ads on your pages when you publish them. Some of the services include the FrontPage Server Extensions.
bulletYour work situation. Many schools and districts, and even other organizations, provide Web space, if the content is related to your job. You will have to contact whoever runs the networks and servers at your organizations to find out about such space and how to access it.

How to Publish to Your Web Server

The exact procedures for publishing your site vary from one server to another. There are some general principles, however:

bullet"Publishing" a website simply means copying your site, including all pages, images, and other files, from your hard drive to the hard drive of the server. It has to be put into the correct folders on the server so that the server program can find it, given the correct address.
bulletThe least satisfying way to do this is to take a floppy disk or Zip disk to your server administrator for copying.
bulletBetter ways to do this are to use the networks. The first way is to use FTP or File Transfer Protocol. Programs such as WS_FTP for Windows computers make it easy to copy the programs from your computer to the hosting computer. You will need the exact address to copy to, and a username and password.
bulletFrontPage offers another way to send the files in your site using it's built-in Publishing features. This requires that the server has the FrontPage Server Extensions installed. You will need an address, username, and password.

Beyond these general guidelines, you will need to get more exact instructions from the hosting organization. Try their website, ask them for instructions, or otherwise make sure you have all the information you need.

© 2001-2007 Albert L. Ingram, Ph.D.