In order to make the pages you've designed available on the Web, you'll need to "publish" them, or upload them from your computer or disk to a Web server. All you'll need is a Web space account and an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. Some popular FTP programs are Fetch (for Mac) and CuteFTP and WS-FTP (for Windows).

To get started, you'll need to login to your Web space account using your FTP program — your host will provide special instructions on how to do this.

Once connected, you will be moving your local files (the ones on your hard drive or from your disk) to your host (the Web server). You will need to select the local files that you'd like to upload to the server.

Be sure to upload all the files associated with every Web page, including not only .html files, of course, but also any images, audio, or video files you're using. If you see an option in your FTP program for a file type of either ASCII/text or binary/raw data, use ASCII/text when transferring HTML files, and binary/raw data when transferring graphics or multimedia files.

Once uploaded they can be accessed by anyone on the Web.

If you want someone to be able to find your pages after you've published them, you should submit your URL to the major search engines.

Most search engines collect information about Web pages by use of automatic "spiders" or "robots" that visit your pages and index the content they find. (Other search engines, such as Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves, actually have individuals go out and visit pages submitted to them and approve them for inclusion.) When spiders/robots index pages, they're "looking" at your HTML source, collecting keywords contained in the HTML text and any text contained in the ALT attribute of your IMG tags.

You may also aid the search engines by classifying your page yourself, with "meta tags." These tags provide descriptive information about your Web page and are not meant to be displayed in the browser window and so they are employed within the HEAD element, along with the TITLE.

<META>
Definition: Specifies information about the document. The META tag has no effect on the appearance of the web page. It is intended for use by other programs, such as search engines or web browsers. [display]

Attributes:

NAME="description|keywords|author"
Specifies a name for the metadocument information.

CONTENT="text"
If the NAME attribute is supplied, the CONTENT attribute specifies the content. The value of the CONTENT attribute is always a single string.

• If NAME="description"
  Specifies a brief description of the Web page; it is recommended that you keep the description content to no more than 200 characters.
• If NAME="keywords"
  Specifies a list of keywords related to the Web page; it is recommended to keep this less than 1000 characters, because if you have more the search engine will either ignore the rest or delete you from the index; commas are not needed to separate keywords.
• If NAME="author"
  Specifies the author's name.

Note:

In practice, when a user searches a search engine that supports meta tags and search for a keyword related to your page, your page may show up in the list of results. Your page will be listed by the content between the TITLE tags and then underneath will be the first hundred or so characters of the description you placed in the meta tag.

Publishing

1. Sign up for a Web space account and practice connecting to the server via an FTP program.
2. Try uploading your files to the server and viewing them on the Web.
3. See what happens if you neglect to upload any graphics and/or multimedia files embedded in your HTML files.
4. Practice uploading both HTML and multimedia files, changing the data source type.

Publishing

• Getting a Personal Web Page Account at the SAIC
• How to FTP to the SAIC server
• Publishing your Page
• FTPing with Fetch (Mac) / FTPing with CuteFTP (Windows)

Critique Day