Site Structure

Local Files

To create a page, you can create a text file and save it with a .htm or .html extension. Then all you have to do is upload the file to the server.

More than likely though, you are going to want to add images, stylesheets, etc. to your pages. If you create a site structure locally, you can edit, test, and save your entire site on your hard drive and then just upload the entire site to your server.

You can do this quite effortlessly. When you do, you will have the site all in one place and know where all the files go on the server. This will help you later when you forget which sub-directory you want a page to be in.

Directory Tree

You are probably familiar with Windows Explorer. This file structure is similar to the structure of your web site files. You have a folder which contains your entire site, this is your root directory. Inside that folder you have files. You also have more folders(sub-directories) with files in them. So to create your first site, just create a folder on your hard drive and name it "MyWebSite" or whatever you feel like calling it. This is your root directory. You can create as many sub-directories as you wish in here. Create a sub-directory called "images". Now you have a root directory and one sub-directory.

Open up notepad or a similar ASCII text editor and save it to "MyWebSite" or whatever you called that folder as index.html. Be sure if you are using notepad that you use the drop-down box for Save As Type and select All Files. You now have a one page web site stored on your local hard drive. Go ahead and open the index.html file with a web browser. The page will open without a problem. There won't be anything on it of course, but you'll fix that later.

If you use relative references in your linking, you can view your entire web site on your hard drive using a browser. Just open up your index.html file and click away.

Uploading Files

When you do upload your files, everything in your "MyWebSite" folder goes in your root directory. This will be usually be a directory on your server called www or public_html. Ask your hosting company where to upload your files if you're not sure.

If you don't have FTP access to your root directory, create identical sub-directories with whatever tools they give you and upload the files on your hard drive to the corresponding directories on your server.

Now when you access http://www.[yoursite].com, you will be accessing your web site.