Business Support Internet

File Transfer Protocol The File Transfer Protocol is the protocol used in communication with an FTP Server. Similar to HTTP which is the protocol used in browsing the Word Wide Web. There are a number of Shareware programs on the Internet available to the public that will allow a person to access FTP servers.

• Sometimes referred to as an FTP client, the FTP program is useful for transferring binary files and uploading text to your Web Site.

• After you have created your web pages click on the OPEN button on the menu bar or from FILE/OPEN LOCATION. The location or the address you will FTP to will be: ftp://youruserid@your.domain.name.here.com Netscape will then prompt you for the password. You will use the same password you login with. This will begin an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) session which will take you to the root directory of your site. Within that folder or directory you will find multiple folders, one called htdocs. The htdocs folder is where you place all your HTML and associated files for your web page. To upload a file, select FILE/UPLOAD FILE and then choose the file you wish to upload.
• User ID - This is generally the name of the person or company who owns a site. Your IP provider will give you or allow you to select a User ID when you subscribe to a service. At the Business Centre your User ID will be selected by you when you subscribe online. To accesss your business site you will need to give the Admin User ID and Password which will only be available to the system administrator of the site.
• Password - Your Password is required when logging on to your site. Or to a site that you have been given special access to. Generally a password is not necessary if you are logging on to a public site. In that case you would use your e-mail address as your password and the word anonymous as your User ID.

• Always name your first page "index.html" in lowercase letters only. The index.html will be your home page the reason for naming it index.html is so that your browser will automatically load it when connecting to the site.

  When creating web pages and uploading them remember that names and links are case sensitive on Network Servers. This includes names of images as well as HTML documents. If your pages are correctly linked and your files are in the correct "htdocs" directory they should be viewable on the Web. If they do not load properley chances are you have not used the proper case in the file name.

  Images that can be seen by browsers must be in GIF or JPEG format. Both of these formats use compression to make the images smaller and load faster. It is not necessary to put your images in the htdocs folder. Sometimes to keep your site directories more organized you may wish to create subdirectories for specific types of files like images or Java or Shockwave. If you do create a subdirectory to store your images in make sure that the directory you create is a subdirectory of your "htdocs" directory or folder. To create a link to an image file in a subdirectory called images, create a link like this:<p> <img src="images/yourimage.gif"> </p> This tells your browser to load the image "yourimage.gif" from the images Subdirectory of htdocs.

  It is not necessary to create directories with all uppercase letters. It is preferable if you create all directories in lower case as well as naming all of your files in lower case.