optimising online revenue

Creating iWeb08 files for upload

October 2009

 

As we've discussed, if you've used iWeb08 to create your site it's not quite as easy as it should be to get online with your own domain name. However, if you've ordered a combination domain and webspace package, the only step left is to transfer the site from your computer to the web space you've ordered.

To do this, you first need to need to obtain all the the website's components - its files.

Websites are usually made up of at least some combination of html files and image files.

Don't worry - you don't have to know anything too in depth about these, but you will see more of them in the next few steps.

Tip: Unfortunately, some elements of sites created in iWeb08 won't work if they're hosted on your own server. These include podcasts, blog comments and the search function. With this in mind, you may want to revise your site before starting this process.

 

How to create your iWeb08 site files

Do the following:

First, make a new folder for your site's files, just in order to keep everything in one place. You can locate this folder anywhere and give it any name you like. We'll call ours 'my site'.

Open iWeb08, choose the File drop-down menu, then click Publish to a Folder.

Browse for the folder you've just created, then click Choose.

iWeb will then start to create your web files inside the folder specified. When it has finished, take a look inside. You should see a file named index.html (your homepage) together with several folders.

Open one of these, and inside you might see further folders containing files, and so on - just like Russian dolls!

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How your site is structured

The use of folders-within-folders is a very common way for websites to be organised, and makes up what is is known as the 'site structure'.

It's essential to leave the structure exactly as it has been created - moving folders or re-naming files would lead, at best, to a site with lots of errors, at worst to one that didn't work at all.

This is because your pages and their content are all linked together in a very specific way.

To try to make this concept easier to understand, let's talk about a page that includes an image.

You wouldn't necessarily know this, but images aren't actually embedded inside pages. Instead, they are generally located in their very own folder.

HTML code makes the image appear on a page by giving behind-the-scenes instructions along the lines of:

"go to the IMAGES folder, which is located HERE; find an image with THIS name; then show it in position on the page which has THIS name"

OK - we agree this is taking code to an extreme level of simplicity, but hopefully it makes it easier to understand how making changes to folders and files would mess up these very specific instructions.

uploading your files to a server

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