Beginner's Guide to Your Web Page

Your web page

Internet America offers 10 MB of web space to its customers for a personal web page. You can put up everything from your snap shots from your Hawaiian vacation to music you composed yourself, to... well, anything you can imagine. That is as long as it is legal and you are not selling a service or product. If you are interested in a commercial page where you can promote your business or product, Internet America offers a wide range of solutions including Airweb, virtual hosting, and co-location of servers. Business Services can help you with any questions about these products if needed.

You can activate your personal web space on line. Your personal web page is located on a server called web2. This server is solely dedicated to our customers' personal web pages. You can tell your friends that they can find your web site at http://web2.airmail.net/yourusername

You have probably decided what you want on our page. You know where it will be located. Now what?

Unlike pages in books and magazines, web pages do not really exist in a page format. Each page that you look at on the web is a compilation of text, links, and images that are brought together by your browser to create the page you see on the screen. Web pages are constructed in a simple programming language called Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). It is fairly easy and does not take long to learn. There are even programs designed to "write" pages for you. Many of these programs are available to download for evaluation, so there is no need to buy software first, then decide if the program is right for you. Some of these programs can be found here.

As helpful as these editors are, it's a good idea to understand the basics of HTML. This way you can edit pages yourself and make minor changes on pages you have made in an editor and not have to reconstruct the page completely. Many people find it just as easy and fast to write their pages without the help of an editor program. There are lots of books and classes available to learn HTML, but the web is your very best resource. Tutorials abound on the web and are great to bookmark so that you can go back and refer to them when you need to refresh your memory about how to do something. One of the best ones is called "Page Tutor" and can be found here. You can learn a much or as little as you wish depending on how complicated you want our page to be. Since web pages are easily changed and updated, you can edit your page and change it as often as you like. You can find some additional links to online HTML tutor pages here.

Once you have your pages written and your images are collected, it is time to put your page where it belongs: in your directory on web2. There are many ways to do this, and many editor programs have FTP (File Transfer Protocol) features built in. A very simple and helpful little program that Internet America recommends for FTP is WS_FTP for PC and Fetch for Mac. They both basically function the same way: they transfer files between your computer and the web2 server. We suggest you download WS_FTP LE. This program is used as an example in the Beginner's Guide to Downloading section. Take a look there to get tips on downloading and setting up that program.

When opened WS_FTP looks this:

Click on the New button on the right of the prominent window and the screen will be wiped clean. Now you can enter the information for FTP'ing your pages to the server. The information you will enter will basically match the information you see above. Profile Name can be anything you want. This is just a name for the profile. The Host Name/Address is web2.airmail.net. Leave then the Host Type on Automatic Detect. The User ID is your username and the Password is your password . Remember, just like when you logon or check your mail, your user name and password are always in lower case. If you want to save your password so that you do not have to enter it each time you update your web page, go ahead and check Save Pwd. Leave everything else blank and click on Apply to save your information.

Click on the Connect button and you will automatically log in to your web site and the screen will look like the picture below.

In the left window you will find your computer's files while in the right window you will find the files on your site on web2. You will notice that there are already a few things on your section of the server. The folders "bin" and "etc" should be left alone. Do not change any information in or about these folders. Do not change their names. Do not delete any information in them. First, you will replace the "index.html" with your new "index.html." This is the name of your "homepage." You will also upload other files, directories, or folders you have created for you website.

If you have any problems or questions, Internet America provides support for web pages by emailing our technical support team. For some of the more advanced features available to your web to page, take a peek at the technical support pages dedicated to personal web pages. For inspiration, take a look at some of the pages your fellow web2 dwellers have created.

Enjoy creating your new home on the web!

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