Developing An Internet Presence Part 3

Developing An Internet Presence Part 1
Developing An Internet Presence Part 2
Developing An Internet Presence Part 3
Developing An Internet Presence Part 4
Developing An Internet Presence Part 5
Developing An Internet Presence Part 6
Developing An Internet Presence Part 7

Ok all is good, we now own our domain name and we have chosen where to store it but how do we get it working?

This is probably the next biggest step. At this stage you should have chosen where you store your website, and take a moment to recall that the ownership of the domain name and where it is stored/hosted are two separate entities. If you have missed the previous articles they are listed at the top of this page.

Were Ready To Go

The supplier of your web space will be able to tell you what the nameservers are and this will need to be changed at the place where you purchased your domain name. Amending the nameservers can take up to 72 hours to filter through but in reality it generally happens quite quickly.

I’ve Done All That But Where Is My Website?

Well all you have done so far is purchase a domain name and pointed/addressed it at some vacant space and if you have achieved that then you are well on the way to an Internet presence.

How Do I Get To My Website?

This is where it starts to get a little more complicated. It’s unfortunate that some technically minded individuals do tend to use a lot of words that mean nothing to an Internet novice. We don’t do this intentionally it just happens sometimes. That said there are a few geeky terms you will need to know and the big one is FTP.

What The Hell Is FTP!

It stands for “File Transfer Protocol”, sounds complicated I know but it is actually quite simple. Although we haven’t created a website as yet, if you had a folder/files on your PC FTP will then give you access to your space on the Internet using an FTP client.

I Don’t Have An FTP Client And How Do I Use It!

This is probably the hardest step. There are quite a few FTP clients out there:

http://www.cuteftp.com
http://www.ipswitch.com

There are so many free ones now but in essence they all do the same job. They create a link from your PC to your website where you can simply upload files.

There will be some basic information required to create a secure login once you have installed the FTP software but most of these come with great FAQ sections.

You will require some information to access your FTP, such as host name, user ID, and password but your hosting provider will supply all of that.