Choosing the Right Format For Your Web Images
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Published on: Sunday 21st June 1998 By: Gary Ransom
You will either find uploading your Home Page to a server the easiest part of the whole process or the most frustrating. One possible obstacle is the technology that has to be overcome, another is the absolute need for a logical approach to ensure that all the right parts of your Home Page are loaded to the right place on your part of the server.
Let's start with the technology:
As you obviously know, you need a special piece of software (a browser) to look at a web site. What you may not yet realise is that you also need another piece of software (called FTP software) to upload a Home Page that you've created to a server.
As a first step, I would recommend that you look at the main web page of the company that you are going to use to host your Home Page. Follow the links on their page to discover their recommended upload process. They should offer FTP software that you can download or a custom made program called an upload wizard (you may already have this as part your service provider's package) plus the settings you will need to use for their server. With any luck the instructions they offer will be clear and make some sense!
Chances are their process will work fine but in my experience you may find it to be fiddly and cumbersome or even find that it simply doesn't work.
The problem with the software or wizards offered by many Service Providers or Home Page hosts is that they can be rather basic and limited in functionality. This suits the provider fine as it makes supporting you, the customer, easier.
If you have the confidence (or need), then try an alternative piece of FTP software. I use a great program suitable for Windows 95 called FTP Explorer. It works brilliantly, is easy to use, is very flexible and it's free for personal use. The above link takes you to the author's Home Page. You should also be able to find this software and other popular alternatives through one of the file finder links offered on the Other Software article.
What was that about a logical approach being needed? This comes in handy when you are designing the structure of your Home Page, as ideally this should be reflected in the directory structure you use on the server.
Have I lost you? I hope not.
This only really becomes an issue if you construct a large Home Page with a large number of sub pages, graphics and links. As soon as you get above a dozen items or so in the same directory, it will start to get difficult to keep track of which item belongs to what. Maintaining your Home Page will be a nightmare. I recommend that you keep each page in its own sub directory on your hard disk, together with its associated files, and mirror this structure on the server. Alternatively, you could put all your HTML files in one directory and the other files in another. Here's a big tip. Always name your files so that it's obvious what they are and what page they are, or belong to. If you don't, I promise you that you'll never remember what's what. Oh, and as a matter of routine, always use lower case for your filenames. This isn't just to guard against case sensitivity problems, it tends to be a requirement for Unix based servers.
Lastly, always check that your pages link together correctly, display the right images and have valid links before you upload your Home Page. You can do this manually by opening your index.html page in your browser locally on your hard disk and following the links. You can also get software that will do this for you. This is particularly helpful if your Home Page contains a lot of links or links to other web sites. These links often change and become invalid very easily. Don't you find it irritating to click on a link and find that it doesn't work? Well, so will anyone that visits your Home Page and finds broken links. Check my software recommendations on the Other Software article.
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>Choosing the Right Format For Your Web Images
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JavaScript Guidelines and Best Practice
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