Website design for gites – 2
This is part 2 in a series describing how to create your own website – see Gite websites for others.
Getting everything set up ready
OK you’ve spent your hard-earned money and got a decent website name – or perhaps you already had one. You’ve also got your hosting sorted out, so now you’re all gung-ho to get a website up and running. Good. Let’s get the tools in place.
FTP
Before we start we need to look at something callled FTP (file transfer protocol). This is how you are going to get files from your computer onto the internet – FTP is used to transfer files between your own PC and your website.
There are lots of free FTP programs available. My personal favourite is fireftp, used with firefox. If you don’t have firefox you can download it at http://www.mozilla-europe.org/fr/firefox/ (or search for ‘firefox’ in google and your local version will be first in the results). It only takes a couple of minutes and is a painless exercise – do it now!
Within firefox you can now go straight to https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/684 (or as before, search for fireftp to find your local version). Again, the install process is very quick and painless, and your firefox will now have a new menu option under Tools (Outils) called fireftp.
Sorted? OK in the fireftp window that opens you are going to create an account. Click on the grey dropdown button, top left of screen, and choose create an account. Add an account name (usually your website name), then you need three further bits of information: Host, Login and Password. You will have received these from your hosting company. Typically the ‘Host’ name is something like ftp://francethisway.com.
Once that is created you can click ‘connect’ to check all is well. Your screen should now be in two halves – your own PC is on the left half, and your remote website on the right half. To use the FTP you simply need to click on the directory and file you want to transfer on the left; highlight the destination on the right, then click the blu arrow in the middle of the screen to send the file across.
Important Note: your hosting will usually already contain a directory called public_html (or perhaps www). This is the directory you want to transfer files to – it is the public face of your website.
So now we are able to transfer files to the internet…but we don’t have any files yet! We need one more piece of software – somewhere to create our pages.
Text editors
You have perhaps heard of Dreamweaver, or FrontPage. There are also a lot of other website design software available. We aren’t going to use any of them for the moment – cheap is good, remember!
One option is to use Note Pad (French: blocnotes) that came with your PC. This is a perfectly acceptable place to start. I prefer to use NotePad++ which is a bit more user friendly – search for Notepad++ and then download (telecharge) and install it. Free of course! Or use notepad if you prefer, no harm done.
It is not practical or recommended to use Microsoft Word as a text editor because it tends to add lots of code and hidden text that you don’t want!
My very first website page
To prove everything works as it should (and you have all week to do this, although it should only take less than an hour) we will create a simple page and publish it using our FTP. Copy the text shown below (from <html> to </html> and including both of those) into your text editor:
<html>
<head>
<title>My brand new website</title>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
</head>
<body>
<p>this will be a lovely website showing off my business or property in France</p>
</body>
</html>
Now save the file on your computer (in a new directory you have set up for your website) with the name index.php.
Go back to your fireftp, find the new file in the listings on the left, highlight it, then click on the blue arrow to send it zooming over to the internet (in the public_html directory, remember).
Did it work? There’s only one way to find out – go and enter your website name to what is there (just the same as any other website you want to visit eg www.french-country-gite.com). You should, if all has gone well, see a file that looks just like THIS.
Any troubles or problems with any of the above, or if you don’t see the file under the website address? Sometimes a brand new website takes a few days to show up properly so don’t panic quite yet. Otherwise post a question in the comments and we’ll try and sort you out.