Publishing with FrontPage 98

How to publish to Hosts/ISPs that support FrontPage® Extensions
How to publish to Hosts/ISPs via FrontPage FTP
Details about FTPing without using FrontPage
FrontPage Troubleshooting
Tips and suggestions

NOTE: If your Host/ISP supports FrontPage extensions make sure ONCE you have enabled the extensions you do NOT publish your site using FTP or the extensions will become corrupted and will have to be reinstalled!

First of all you need to be online to publish to your host/ISP so connect to the www.

How to publish to Hosts/ISPs that support FrontPage® Extensions:

Open FrontPage Explorer.

Open the FrontPage web located on your local machine that you intend to publish to your domain.

Select "Publish FrontPage Web..." from the file menu.
At this point you will be presented with a dialog box.
- If you are using FrontPage 97:
  1. You will see two input fields. In the first one labeled "Destination Web Server or File location" enter your domain name such as myweb.com (all lower-case)
  2. Leave the second field as the default <Root Web> or leave it blank.
  3. Publish your web by clicking OK.
- If you are using FrontPage 98:
  1. You should see one input field labeled as the location to publish your FrontPage web. If you do not see this, click on "More Webs..."
  2. Insert your domain name such as http://www.myweb.com/ (all lower-case)
  3. Click the OK button, and the next OK button to initiate publishing.
FrontPage will start publishing, and you will be prompted for a username and password. Enter your Host/ISP username and password and click OK.

That should be it. At this point FrontPage publishes your site to your host/ISP account online. If you are not publishing for the first time, or you are publishing a sub web, the steps are essentially the same. If you have problems with this procedure, (such as FrontPage invoking the Web Publishing Wizard instead of publishing) take a look at the trouble shooting section below.

How to publish to Hosts/ISPs via FrontPage FTP:

Examples: Hosts/ISPs require different information sometimes, here below are A few different examples.

Example 1: Xoom: Does not support FrontPage Extensions so you have to publish using FTP!

After pressing publish
click on More webs
and then in the specify location box put uploads.xoom.com
In the host box put ftp.xoom.com
In the directory box ( which is usually left empty) leave blank
In the user name box - ( This will be what you signed up as, with the host e.g. In the user name box - ( This will be what you signed up as, with the host e.g. http://members.xoom.com/tinaalice/ so my user name is tinaalice)
Password - (The password is ************* what ever you made it:)

Example 2: NWlink: Does not support FrontPage Extensions so you have to publish using FTP!

This is an American host but I had to help my brother out, who lives there, so I happen to know the protocol and thought I would post it here. (You can click on his site for some great info about meteorites, see below:) Some other ISP might have the public_html directory section in use. (It took me a while to figure this out, they did not make it very clear)

After pressing publish
click on 'More webs'
and then in the specify location box put your URL e.g.: http://www.nwlink.com/~jcass/index.html
Making sure you name your first page index.
In the host box put www.nwlink.com
In the directory box ( which is usually left empty) put public_html
In the user name box - ( This will be what you signed up as, with the host e.g. http://www.nwlink.com/~jcass/index.html so my user name is jcass)
password - (The password is ************* what ever you made it:)

Details about FTPing without using FrontPage:

If you require more help to FTP your site
The Absolute Beginner's Guide is a website devoted to Freeserve (a UK ISP) however the instructions there can be adapted for any FTP host/ISP.

File Transfer Protocol a.k.a. FTP is used to transfer documents from your hard drive to your host You can use FTP to manage files in your allocated area. This includes uploading, downloading, deleting, moving, renaming your files and creating/deleting directories. A selection of FTP clients for both Mac and Windows users can be downloaded from Tucows. I recommend Cute FTP as this allows a like minded feature of FP which is 'only publishing the files that are changed'. This is shareware though. An easy one to use is FTP WS-Lite and this is Freeware!

Though are you are aware that there is FrontPage 3rd Party Add-on made by KissFP?

FrontPage Troubleshooting:

The advantage of using FrontPage for creating and publishing your site is the ease with which such tasks can be done. However, as with any program, there are commonly made mistakes to watch out for. Here are some simple tips that can help you prevent the most common snags when using Microsoft FrontPage.

Make sure that you have an Internet connection when you attempt to publish your site. If you do not have an Internet connection established, FrontPage will invoke the Microsoft Publishing Wizard or possibly report other errors. If this happens, cancel the publishing procedure, establish an Internet connection, and try again.

Do not attempt to use the Microsoft Publishing Wizard to publish your site. It is surprisingly difficult to use, and can potentially cause problems with your FrontPage web. Instead, publish through the FrontPage Explorer which is easier to use in comparison.

Do not use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to publish a site which has the FrontPage Extensions configured. FrontPage expects that webs will be published through the FrontPage Explorer. If you use FTP, components of your web (webbots in particular) may not function properly and will almost certainly become corrupted.

When publishing your pages, list your domain in lower-case letters such as: myweb.com Normally domain names are not case-sensitive, but using upper-case letters when publishing may not work properly.

If you have installed AOL (American OnLine) software after installing FrontPage, FrontPage may not function properly, automatically invoking the Microsoft Publishing Wizard when you attempt to publish, or possibly reporting other errors. If you experience this, you will need to reinstall the FrontPage Personal Web Server.

Tips and suggestions:

1. HTML Filenames are case sensitive.

I recommend you upload your files in lowercase only.
When you write your html files, be sure and refer to any image or other html files in lowercase also. Your HTML and actual filenames must match exactly, in order for your page to display correctly.

2. Member Names and Passwords are case sensitive so make sure weather or not your cap lock should be on.

Remember that your Member Name and Password are case sensitive and you must enter them exactly as shown on your Welcome email. For e.g. if your member name is "joe", entering JOE will not work. This also applies to your password, and the names of any files you upload. All are case sensitive.

3. Always remember to keep local (backup) copies of your remote Web sites!

There is no substitute for having personal backup copies of important Web site data. In case of disaster recovery there is never a guarantee that your Web site information can be retrieved.

In order to save a copy of your Web to your local hard drive, simply publish the Web to a location on your hard drive.

Through FrontPage Explorer, press 'File' and 'Publish'.
Then 'More Webs' and you will see something like. <http://default/copy_of_accessfp>
Press OK.
The site is then Published to your hard drive.