Creating Your Own Web Page

Creating and publishing a website can be a complex process. Here's a step-by-step procedure to generate your own site and publish it in your personal web space that comes free with your Internet account.

Learning HTML & Creating Your Pages

The first step in creating a website is to learn the basics of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). A web page is simply a plain text file (created in a text editor such as Notepad or Simpletext) with various HTML commands. HTML is an easy language to learn, and a good place to start is HTML Code Tutorial.

If you don't have the time to learn HTML, you can use any of the popular "What you see is what you get" web page creation software such as Microsoft FrontPage. By using this type of software, you can create web pages without learning HTML.

Testing Your Pages

No matter whether you code your HTML by hand or with software, you will need to test your pages in a web browser. You can do this by simply selecting File --> Open and selecting your page. If you page doesn't appear correctly in both Netscape and Internet Explorer, you might want to make a few modifications. Also, you should make sure your images appear and your links work.

Publishing Your Site

Once you're happy with your site, you can publish it to your personal web space (if you have an Internet account with us). Just see our instructions below on Uploading and accessing your personal web space, upload your files (using FTP software), and your home page will be http://web.ptmc.net/~username.

Uploading and Accessing Your Personal Web Space

To upload your files to your new web page, you will need to use FTP software, such as: WS_FTP, CuteFTP, Fetch, etc. Using FTP software, connect to ftp.ptmc.net but not via an Anonymous login. Enter the Username and Password you are currently using for your own account. When FTP makes the connection to the server, you will be placed in your top-level folder. There will already be one or more subfolders shown on the Remote host side, such as WORKSPACE. One of these folders will be WWW. Change to that folder (most simply by double-clicking on the WWW folder name).

You will see that the start page file called index.html has already been created for you, which contains the web page you are now reading. This must be the name of your start page in order for your personal web site to work. You may want to rename this version before replacing it with yours when doing the ftp file transfer.

Copy all relevant files from your system to your new WWW folder. (This would include all of your HTML files, as well as any graphics or other files that are referenced within those HTML files.) Be sure to copy all HTML files in ASCII mode! You can now access these files across the Net using any WWW browser.

The URL for your new Personal Web Site is: http://web.ptmc.net/~username where username is your Internet Account Login Username.

Note: You can view any specific page of your web site by including it's filename in the URL. For example, you may simply open the following URL: http://web.ptmc.net/~username/filename