Maintaining Your Website


Before we begin, please remember: maintaining your site is easy!  Really!  There are a few basic things that you need to learn.  After that, you can take off on your own & start designing sites to do basically anything that you want!

WEB SERVERS
We maintain your website on our Web Servers.  These are special computers that are connected to the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  The computer constantly monitors the Internet connection for requests for information.  When it receives a request, it delivers the information.  When a person surfs the Internet and lands in your site, they are really sending a request to the web server to deliver certain web pages, images or other documents!

WEB SERVERS ARE BASICALLY BLIND
The web server just serves up documents that are requested.  Generally speaking, it does not care what the document contains, whether the page is attractive or informative, or whether the person wants text, graphics or sounds.  It simply delivers whatever it is told to deliver.  Thus, if a page doesn't look right or sound doesn't come up, it is typically because of a mistake in the design of the page or because a file has been given the wrong name in a link.

WEB PAGES ARE EITHER .HTM  .HTML  or  .ASP
Web pages are really just text documents.  They usually have the ending ".htm" or ".html"... it doesn't matter which you use... just pick one and be consistent.  There is also a new type of page called .asp pages.  These are generated by FrontPage 98/2000 and are essentially HTML with additional tags and functionality.  All web pages include  special tags (in the format <tag> ) which your browser then interprets and gives meaning.  For example, a tag such as <BOLD> will bold text.  Other tags are used for many purposes, such as defining hyperlinks, character fonts, alignment and styles, placement of images, formating of tables (great to use for laying out your page the way you like) and more.  See our HTML Discussion page for a brief overview of the tags and links to other resources.

IMAGES ARE GENERALLY .GIF and .JPG FILES
Images are binary files which are saved in the format .gif (good for logos and graphic art) and .jpg files (good for photographs).  Many programs exist on the market and on the Internet to help you design these images.  Be sure to use the right file extension when creating the files and when referring to them in your documents.  If you can't get an image to come up in your browser, try calling it as a document (as you would with a web page) by entering a URL like http://www.yourdomain.com/directory/image.gif  If it does not load, then you do not have a good file -- it may be corrupt or in another format.  If it loads here and not in your webpage, then you are probably referring to it in the web page by the wrong name, wrong directory, or forgot to refer to it at all.

.jpg files are used with photographs.  They can compress images considerably (up to 95% in size) without any real loss in picture quality.  Make sure that if you scan images, you do so at 72 dpi (dots per inch).  Yes, your scanner may be capable of scanning at 600, 1200 or more.  But a computer monitor can only display at 72.  Since you are putting the images on the Internet, that is the size that you need.  If you scan, for example, at 600, the screen will drop most of the resolution & only display at 72.  End result?  An identical picture that is about 80 times larger, which could take a half of an hour to download instead of 20 seconds!

Also, remember that when using .jpg's you should turn up the compression to about 50-75% or more (this is a setting that appears when you try to save a file as .jpg).  The quality loss is negligible and the drop in file size is drastic -- often from about 500,000 bytes down to 15,000 bytes, without any real loss of quality!  This means you use less of you web space and, more importantly, the image will download thirty times faster!

GETTING FILES ONTO YOUR SERVER
Once you finish designing your pages and images, you need to copy them from your PC or MAC to the web server.  Remember that you are only copying them to us, and that the original stays on your computer.  When you need to do updates, you do them on your computer and then upload the updated files up to our servers!

There are several ways of uploading files to our servers (and, for that matter, deleting files, renaming files and downloading files).  First, everyone should download an FTP program if they don't have one already.  This functions like Windows Explorer.  It represents your computer's hard drives, directories and files on one side of the screen, and your web site on the other side.  You can then upload and download files by dragging and dropping them from one side of the screen to the other!  Very easy!  Also, you can delete or rename files RIGHT ON THE SERVER!  No need to download them first!

Additionally, many programs used to design web pages (such as Hot Metal Pro, Allaire's Home Site, and FrontPage 98/2000) include functionality to upload pages that you design in their systems directly to our servers.  Configurations of these programs are detailed in their manuals, and our HTML systems page provides you with the information you need to configure those programs.