FTP - a beginners guide

When you've finished making edits to your pages with Buildor/Lite you'll need to transfer the resulting HTML file to your web server so visitors to your site will see the updates.

When your site was first set up it was uploaded to your web server and you visit the pages by entering your URL or website address (contrary to popular belief, your website does not live on Google, Yahoo or even Bing!).

The easiest way to upload pages to your site is to use an FTP client (client basically means a piece of software) or our integrated FTP tool.

To use either of these you need to know your FTP details. These were either:

• Sent to you in an email when you registered your URL (website address)
• Were set up by you when you set up your hosting (did you save them somewhere??)
• Or were set up by the person who built your website in the first place

You will need the following The FTP details

Your FTP host name - this is usually your URL preceded by ftp instead of www. For example:

www.yourhostname.com

becomes

ftp.yourhostname.com

Your FTP user name and password - these, of course, will be unique to you.

Publish

Next you need to enter all of you details into the relevant box that displays when you click Publish in the top menu.

We will save all of your FTP details except Password for the next time you want to publish a file.

Directory

You need to enter the correct Directory to save your files in the right place.

For example, if the web page you are editing lives at:


http://your-site.com/articles/article1.html

then you would enter articles into the directory folder.

If the page you are editing lives at the "root level" it does not have a directory as such. For example:


http://your-site.com/article1.html

or

http://your-site.com/

both live at the "root level" so you just leave the Directory blank.

NOTE: If you are editing:

http://your-site.com/ or http://your-site.com/articles/

the page you are loading is the default file in that Directory. This is usually index.html or index.htm but it can be many other files depending on how you web server is set up. To be able to save this file back to your server you will need to work out the file name. You can do this by browsing the files in that directory using an FTP client or we'd recommend asking whomever set the site up for you in the first place.

If you're struggling with working out file names, drop us a line using our feedback form here.