The Complete HTML Teacher

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is a software program that is used to transfer files from one computer system to another. When you transfer your webpages from your hard drive to your site, you are actually transferring them to your webhosts computers. Transferring files is not hard, and it is usually faster to use an FTP client than it is to use your webhosts file manager. There are many different FTP clients. Two of the best, easiest to use are: CuteFTP and WSFTP. Of course, you will have to download an FTP client before you can transfer files using ftp....I bet you knew that! After you have downloaded your ftp client of choice, you have set up an account with a webhost, and you are ready to upload your pages to your site...simply open your ftp client, and tell it what it wants to know. It will usually ask you to give the site you are about to connect to a name. This name can be anything you want...this is for your own use. It will then ask you for the host name/address. This will be the ftp address that your webhost gave you. If you don't know it, you should contact your webhost for the address. Where it says Host Type, you will want to have "Automatic Detect". Username or User I.D. is the user name that you have with your webhost. Password is also the password that you set up through your webhost. Make sure that you uncheck "Anonymous", and hit connect. All other boxes in the ftp client should be left either blank, or as they were when you first opened the client, unless otherwise specified by your webhosting service. Once you are connected, you need to find the files that you want to transfer. The files that are on your harddrive are in the left hand column, the files on the computer you are transferring to are in the right hand column. Locate the file you want to transfer, highlight it with your mouse, then select transfer or upload...depending on which client you are using. If you have a group of files all together that you want to upload, you can select them all, by highlighting one file, holding down the shift key, and selecting the last file in that group. This should cause all of those files to become highlighted...you then upload them. See how easy that was? Making A Successful Site Contents