Going Live With Your Web Site

Once you've got a site completed, you need to make it public. There are two steps here.

First, you need to find a web-hoster, a place which will "host" your site. A host is basically a computer hooked up to the internet 24/7/365; some people run webservers out of their homes, by leaving their computer on all the time, and setting up some web serving software. As this site's address is currently "www.homemadeparachute.com/courses/html", the host, in this case, is homemadeparachute.com. You may have some space allocated to you by your ISP, or Internet Service Provider (Rogers, Telus, Intergate, or whoever you pay for your internet connection). Often a small amount (5 MB or so) is included with your service package, as is often quite enough to get a reasonable site up and running (one of the site's we've looked at in this class, www.derekfairbridge.com, is less than 1 MB in total; another, www.luzform.com, is just over 5 MB, but it has a lot of images (181, to be precise); a much larger site, www.pechetandrobb.com, uses just over 22 MB for HTML and 1547 images).

All of those sites, by the way, as well as this one, are hosted in Edmonton, with a company called tera-byte. Geographical proximity makes little difference on the web.

Second, if you want, you may want to arrange a domain name, something.com or something.net or something.org. this is a way of making your site easy to find and easy to remember (the old address for this site, homepage.mac.com/jamesmbaker/webdesign, was particularly hard to remember, because there was no "www" in there, and it was longer than it really should have been. Ideally, i suppose, www.jamesbaker.com/webdesign would be better, but sadly, www.jamesbaker.com is already taken. www.homemadeparachute.com/webdesign will have to do).

Domain names are agreed upon methods of people finding sites on the web. What happens is that each and every computer connected to the internet is given an IP address, which looks like 216.194.100.31. You can directly type IP addresses into a browser's address bar if you want, or enter random numbers, if you want to be surprised. Because long strings of specific numbers are hard to remember, domain names are used, which are pointers to specific IP addresses. When you "rent" a domain name through Verisign or other domain name seller, you essentially are asking to have a specific name point to an IP address where your site currently or soon will reside. Once the name is registered, a select group of special computers called Domain Name Servers make the connection between your IP address and the name you've chosen. So when someone enters the domain name www.homemadeparachute.com, this "domain name look-up" server first checks to see where www.homemadeparachute.com is, and, if it finds an IP address, then re-directs you onto that web server. If you mistype a name, like www.homemadeparachut.com, you'll likely get an error like "the specified server could not be found", which means there is no IP address attached to the domain name homemadeparachut.com.

(In the new world if intellectual property disputes on the web, when the rock band Jethro Tull launched their web site, they found out that a body guard company in Florida had registered the name www.jethrotull.com, forcing the band to use the more obscure www.j-tull.com. Taking this brand-name theft to the World Intellectual Property Organization, it was ruled that the body guard company had used bad faith to trade on Jethro Tull's "good name", and the domain name jethrotull.com was granted to the band. This entailed a relatively simple switch in the domain name look-up servers, who simply rematched jethrotull.com from the Florida IP address to the band's web server address, so the next time someone entered www.jethrotull.com, they were directed to the band's web site.)

So let's say you've got some space arranged, a place on a web server, either with a domain name or not. What do you do?

What's happening here is the process for authoring and viewing a web page.

  1. The author creates an html document on his or her own computer, and tests it.
  2. When the document is good, the author uploads it to a file server, usually using an ftp program like Transmit (on a Mac) or Cuteftp (on Windows). Transmit's interface looks like this:

    As you can see, there's no visual display of the document's contents, just a list of all files.

    Once the files are uploaded, there are two copies: one on the web server, and one on the author's computer.

  3. Using a url, or uniform resource locator (much like a phone number), a viewer requests a file from the web server.
  4. The web server receives the request, and sends the requested files, including the html document and the images it contains, to the user's computer.
  5. The user's browser interprets the html document, and displays it accordingly.

This last step may take much longer than you'd think; if a web page is slow to load, there are two main reasons: either internet traffic is slow, or the page is complicated or excessively large, and it's taking the browser quite a while to figure out how to display it. As a designer, there's frankly not a lot you can do about the first situation, but you can work on the second to help the browser out. Things you can do: