Publishing your website to the internet

Great, so we've created a site, now we want to get it online. We're going to use-- we need a host, and a domain name. You generally buy those together. I've got a whole course of my domain names, and hosting. Let's go into the quick version here, to get you going. So, log into your account. I only use 'GoDaddy'. It's the world's biggest, most popular hosting. If you got something else, it's not far off, there'll be slight quirks. 

What we're going to do is, I'm going to log in to my account. Okay, so what I want to do is go to web hosting. We already bought our web hosting, and paid for a domain name. We've got the basic hosting. Hit 'Manage'. Wait for it to load. 

You're looking for this thing, called FTP Accounts, it's our File Transfer Protocols. They tell you how you upload your website to your hosting service. So, to create one, you put it in here, you're going to call this one 'Testing'. You can give it your name. It doesn't really matter. Doesn't have to be an email address, kind of looks like it, but no, you can just make up anything in here. Give it a password.  Make sure it's a really good one, not like my one here; a very simple one. I'm going to go and delete this account, just in case, right after this.  

Now the big thing when you’re using GoDaddy is that-- can you see it? Put in a username here, it's going to make a sub-folder; it’s not what I want. It needs to go into 'public_html' Now, that's kind of a tradition, where things go. Now if you're using somebody else's web hosting, they'll tell you whether it's-- sometimes it has htdocs, and some names, and public, and nearly always though, it has public underscore html 'public_html'. It's like the root of everything that it goes into.   

Click 'Create account'. And the only thing we need to know now is-- well, we need to be using our own username, and our own password. So just jump into Dreamweaver. Let's open up our site, and go to 'Manage Sites'. Here's 'Dans Portfolio'. We made this right at the beginning, right? That's the one where we-- in here, remember we did the local folder on our hard drive, and we told it where the images went.  

Now what we're going to do is go to this one called 'Servers', and then hit '+', and then in here, we're going to call it 'GoDaddy'. It doesn't really matter what you call it in here. FTP, perfect. The FTP address. Now this can-- if you're not using GoDaddy, this can be different. 'Bringyourownlaptop.com'.  

Sometimes, it doesn't need the FTP, for some hosts. In this case it does. Username was '[email protected]'. Now again, sometimes, some hosting just needs the username, they don't need all this junk. Add password, put that in. And now you're going to hit 'Test' and you're going to cross your fingers. Hey, connected successfully. 

Now, that worked for me, because I know what I'm doing. Hosting is by far the hardest bit to get set up. Now, don't be afraid if it's still not working. You've tested it, you've tried the FTP without this username. And, the other things you can try is, down here, the ‘root directory, sometimes you need to put in a public underscore html, forward slash, 'public_html/'. Down here, sometimes, under ‘More Options’, you need to turn off  'Passive FTP'.  There's a few little things you can play around with, but my advice is, don't stress too far, or too long, just email the hosting company. Send them a screenshot of this here, and say, 'This is the details I need. What is it?' And more often than not they send you the details.  

So now, what you do, is hit 'Save', hit 'Done'. Great! Click 'OK'. Great! And, now what you do is you go up to 'Site'. So it's connected now, but nothing's really happened.  You got this thing called 'Local', and you got this other one now, called 'Remote'. And that's what we want. Local's on our machine. Remote is GoDaddy, it's the hosting service. And we go to 'Site', and we go to 'Put'. And, you hit 'Put’. It's going to go through and connect, and then it's going to ask you, 'Would you like to put up the dependent folders?' And you click, 'Yes'. The dependent folders are things like-- it's going to put the html up, but then it needs to put the css up, there's other css, and Javascript. It goes through, and puts up all the images.  

I'm going to hit 'Cancel' in this case. Why? Because at the moment, I'll upload this weird, not weird, but this portfolio over the top of my website 'Bringyourownlaptop.com'. I don't want to do that, but what you do is, let it run through, then you go to 'Bringyourownlaptop.com', or your url, and your portfolio should be there. Now if it doesn't, just drop me a line add in the comments, and I'll give you a hand.  

Definitely, connecting the server up is the hardest bit for anybody, it's even-- it's still hard for me. I hate it when I get a new host, or if I'm using a client's new host, and I have to work out all the different settings. 

All right, that's how to connect a site using GoDaddy, and yes, that will be it for this video.