How to become a webmaster in one afternoon!

Being a webmaster is not difficult especially if you have a simple site. You just need a few hours on a weekend afternoon to learn the basics, and the rest of it is fairly intuitive and you can learn it as you go.

To begin, you will need a domain name and a web host. If you haven’t gotten either of these yet, I recommend the following vendors:

• Name.com – for domain name registration. It’s prices start at $5.9 a year!
  
• Godaddy.com – for domain name registration. It’s hard to beat at $9.20 a year (with tax included)
  
• Lunarpages.com – for web hosting. I’ve tried several web hosts in the past, and these guys have been the best by far. One of the best qualities about them is the excellent support that they provide.

If you decide to go with a web host , it’s a good idea to make sure that they have cPanel or Plesk, a program that allows you to easily manage the features on your account.

Got your domain name and web host? Well, let’s go ahead and launch a site on your domain. Here are the steps that we’ll go through:

1. Point your domain name to your host


2. Download a sample website


3. Obtain FTP software and connect to your host via FTP


4. Transfer sample website files to your host
   

Point your domain name to your host

When you signed up with your web host, they should tell you what your login information and DNS information is. You will need the DNS information in order to point your domain name to your web host. There should be two addresses that look something like:

NS1.SOMETHING.COM

NS2.SOMETHING.COM

And there may also be corresponding IP Addresses.

NS1: 12.345.678.99

NS2: 13.452.345.88

You will then have to go into your domain name registrar account and point your domain name to the DNS and IP Addresses (if required by registrar) you were given. If you’re doing this in Godaddy, here are the steps you would take:

1. Log in at godaddy.com


2. Go to Domains (at the top) > My Domain Names.


3. Make sure that the domain is unlocked. If you see a yellow padlock next to your domain name, then it’s locked. You can unlock it by checking the box to the left of the domain and click on “Set Locking” at the top


4. Click on the domain, allowing you to administer it


5. Go to “Nameservers Summary” on the right hand side and click “Click here to see details or to modify” and insert the DNS addresses that you were given and click on “Save Changes.” In Godaddy’s case, you don’t need to do anything with the corresponding IP Addresses as long as you’re given actual DNSes from your web host.

That’s all there is to pointing your domain name to your web host. For the change in DNS to be reflected across the web it may take 24-48 hours. This is called propagation.

Download a sample website

If you have the files for your own website, that’s great. Otherwise, we’ll go ahead and download a sample website that someone else put together and posted. A good place to find one is at Open Source Web Design. Lets try this one. Download and unzip the file and you will notice that there are 2 files and one folder in the packet. One of the 2 files that you see is the index.html file, which serves up the content for your homepage. The file called “onlinebusiness” is a CSS file, which tells the web browser what type of styling should be used on your site. The folder called “images” contains all the graphics.

If your site is a simple, static site with only a handful of pages and doesn’t use content management software, this will be the format of your site. Each page will be controlled by a single html file – for example, if you have an about us page, you’d have a file called about.html or something similar to that containing all your text for the page, you’ll have one CSS file that controls how your site will look and you’ll have a folder with all the graphics and images in it.

Obtain FTP software and connect to your host via FTP

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is how you will transfer the web files that you downloaded to your web host’s server and make them publicly viewable to anyone on the Web. There is a bunch of free FTP software available for download. I’ve been using FileZilla for some time now, and recommend it (when downloading, select “FileZilla” and not “FileZilla Server”).

With FileZilla, you can add the FTP information for as many of your websites as you want, so you’ll easily be able to transfer files to and from them. When you install and run FileZilla on your computer, the first thing you’ll want to do is add the FTP information for your web host. This includes an FTP address, a username and password. This information should all have been provided to you by your web host. With Lunarpages, the FTP username and password is the same as your general login and they send it to you in a welcome e-mail.

When you’re adding your site to FileZilla, first you’ll want to come up with a site name that will get associated with your login -this can really be anything. Then enter in the “Host” or FTP address, the username and password. Logontype should set to “normal.” Then, try connecting. Your FTP software should attempt to connect to the host, validate the login information and then output the directory structure for your server. If login is successful, it should say something like, “Directory listing successful.” Some web hosts may require you to sign on under passive mode instead of default mode, so if the FTP software seems to be logging in, but you’re not getting “Directory listing successful” or you’re getting some kind of error message, try changing the advanced settings for that site from “default mode” to “passive mode” in your FTP software. If you’re still having difficulty, ask for help from your web host.

Transfer files to your host

When you’re logged into the FTP host, you should see the host folder structure on the right hand side and a local (on your computer) folder structure on the left. You should also see a bunch of different folders that may not make much sense like “logs”, “etc”, and “public_ftp”. You should locate a folder called “www” or “httpdocs” or “public_html”. If you have more than one of the ones mentioned, it shouldn’t matter which one you go into. Lets say you have a “www” folder. You can double-click on it to dive into it. This is the folder in which your live web files will should be placed. To transfer the files, simply drag and drop them from the folder structure on the left to the right and FileZilla will begin transferring the files. Using our sample website as an example, you would transfer the index.html file, the allbusiness.css file and the “image” folder.

Once the files are transferred, they should be live on the web. Try navigating to your domain to see them. If it hasn’t been 48 hours after changing the domain DNS to point to your server, it may not have propagated yet, so you may have to wait for 48 hours before seeing the site live. Often a web host will give you an alternate URL where you’ll be able to see your live files. For example, I can see my site at domain.com but also at http://servername.lunarpages.com/~loginname. Once you have files for your site, whether you’ve gotten them from an html coder or from a Frontpage design you did yourself and are ready to make them live on the web, you can simply delete the sample files from the ftp server and replace them with your own.

Conclusion

One thing that confuses people is the index.html file. The index.html file is there to control what gets displayed on your website homepage – domain.com. You don’t have to navigate to domain.com/index.html to see it. You can simply go to domain.com and the contents of the file will be displayed. The web server knows to display the content of index.html when someone navigates to domain.com. All the other files, however, will have to be navigated to directly, so a “contact us” page would live at domain.com/contact.html.

Some other things you may want to do as part of managing your site include setting up e-mail addresses or seeing how much traffic your site is getting. Both of these tasks, as well as a lot of others, can be done easily from the cPanel. Below is a screenshot of what it looks like. Spend some time acclimating yourself with cPanel, and you will be able to see that it provides you with a good number of features including many you may not have heard of. Always feel free to ask your web host questions if you don’t understand how to do something or if something seems broken.