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
 | The Discussion Web |
 | The Guest Book Page |
 | Hit Counters |
 | Forms Processing (e.g. emailing form data or storing it in a text
file) |
 | and 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
 | The 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. |
 | The 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/ |
 | Your 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. |
 | Free 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. |
 | Your 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:
 | "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. |
 | The least satisfying way to do this is to take a floppy disk or
Zip disk to your server administrator for copying. |
 | Better 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. |
 | FrontPage 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.
|
|