Managing Your Own Web Site

Setting up a web page on the Internet is something that just about everyone wants to do. ETI offers this option on both our Surfer and our Base accounts. You are allowed up to twenty megabytes of disk storage on our main UNIX server, and up to two gigabytes per month of bandwidth usage.

For most users, these features are far more than they need. With this abundance of resources, you can build top quality web sites and host them for only the cost of a standard account. In the event you do need to exceed these boundaries, you can expand the services offered under your standard account. ETI is here to work with you to solve your web hosting needs. To this end, we make every attempt to assist our customers in utilizing their service with our company.

There are three main steps in creating a web site. The first is the construction, or preparation, of the web site. Our users take various approaches to building their web sites, so we support a variety of options. Many software programs are available to assist in this part of the process.

Graphical editing packages such as Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia's Dreamweaver and NetObjects Fusion, are excellent for beginners and experts alike. With the ability to quickly create, modify, and publish your site with a few clicks, these are often the type of editors newcomers to the web arena will use.

Users who are familiar with HTML (the language of the web) and users who want to control the way in which their pages are constructed will often choose text-based editors. Macromedia's HomeSite is one of the most popular text-based HTML editors; there are also many excellent freeware and shareware text-based HTML editors. Most of these provide shortcuts and pre-programmed buttons to remove the drudgery of coding by hand. In a pinch, Windows users can edit their web pages with the Notepad editor, in fact, some "purists" take pride in it.

Some users prefer to edit the HTML in a telnet session right on the server with UNIX-based text editors such as pico or vi. The advantage of this is that your changes are updated live and there is no need to take a separate step to upload them. Because the files are being updated live, editing mistakes also appear instantaneously.

The second step in creating a web site is publishing it. Once you have the site built, you will need to upload it — or copy it — to the server on our side. There are a number of methods to choose from, depending on the software that you are using. Many graphical editors allow you to "publish" the site through the software itself. Others require you to save the site locally on your machine, then upload it to the server using FTP.

The third — and most often overlooked — step is web site maintenance. Most often, you will make updates to the copy of your web site that is on your computer and then upload the pages you have changed. It is important to keep a backup copy of all the files that make up your web site in a separate directory on your hard drive; the first time you want to want to undo a change you've made, the backup copy will prove its value.