Fast Homepage: How to Jump Start and Get Your First Homepage Running Online?

Fast Homepage is a brief guide to aid beginners jump start on the internet.

Having registered free homepages is only the first step to your online success.  You got to invest some time, more or less, learning how to write your homepage and put it on the web. And meantime when you write your pages you need to have submitting issue in your mind so that your site will be written to be suitable for spidering by search engines, and thus can be ranked well after submission to bring traffic. Finally, and hopefully, some money can be made on it through certain marketing efforts.

In our opinion, the fastest way to get your first homepage running is learning to use a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) program to write a simple page, say, an under-construction notice, without HTML knowledge.  And secondly learn to use a FTP program to upload it to the web. After that you'll have real feels to the web, you then come back to learn HTML coding and other complicated stuff. You'll find it much easier to grasp them at that time than if you do right now. 

There're different WYSIWYG programs listed on our Free Download page, and you may like to choose one from.  But we strongly encourage you, if affordable, to use Microsoft's FrontPage 2000 because... 

• It's a member of Microsoft Office family and has the same feel or format as Microsoft Word and other Office programs and, therefore, easier to learn if you've used Microsoft Word or other Office programs for a while. 

• Currently more than 80% of web surfers utilize Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and when a web page is viewed through IE, probably no other program get you more WYSIWYG than FrontPage or more compatible with IE. 

• There is a very good help file, within FrontPage, to teach not only how to use FrontPage but also how to write your homepage with it, and more tutorial is available online as well.

If you're familiar with Word, it doesn't take you much time to write a simple text only web page. Just open FrontPage, click "File"on the top-left corner of your screen, point to "New" and click "Page...", and a window called "New" opens, then select "Normal Page" under the category of "General" by left double click so that a new file is opened for you.  

Now type something on it, like "Thanks for visiting. This page is under construction.  Please call back again... etc." or anything you like to say. From "Format" of the top, select "Font..." to format the font type, size and color of what you've just typed, and click "Paragraph..." to adjust the location of the text on the screen.  

You can even use Window's Copy and Paste functions to quickly transfer anything to your FrontPage file without typing.  But if you copy something from web, you'd better paste it on Notepad first and than copy it again and paste to FrontPage because sometimes FrontPage may change the codes during the copy and paste process from web.  

When it's done, click "File again, select "Save" from the drop-down list, and the "Save as.." window appears on the screen. Choose the location where you'd like to save your file by using the top small window called "Save in:", and type your file name, for example, "index.html"into the lower small window called "File Name", and finally click the bottom called "Save" beside the "File Name" window.  That's it.

Now let's upload your simple text only homepage to the web.  There are different ways to do this, and we only introduce FTP method here...  

There are many FTP programs out there you can select, but CuteFTP and WS_ FTP are probably the two of the most popular ones.  You need only one of them although we're going to talk about both.  Let's check CuteFTP first...

How to Use CuteFTP

To FTP your homepage to the web using Cute FTP,  you need to have CuteFTP installed in your computer.  CuteFTP can be downloaded here. This is a compressed file, and a decompression utility will be needed to unzip it and then install into your computer.  

Now let's get started...    

First, open CuteFTP and set up Site Manager. Press F4 to open the Site Manager, and then Click New... to create a new record and add your site to the Site Manager. 

The following settings should be entered correctly.  Otherwise you cannot go through.

FTP Host Address: youe-domain.g2gm.com (if you have your site host with us)
FTP site User Name: your-domain.g2gm.com
FTP site Password: your password 
Login Type: Normal 

Note: Login and Passwords are case sensitive. If you chose lucky as your log-in name, type lucky.g2gm.com into the Login. The same is true for password, which must be entered exactly as one you registered.

There are three transfer types, ASCII, Binary and Auto. Image files such as gif or jpeg should be uploaded in Binary mode, and html files in ASCII mode. To avoid problems choosing wrong file type, simply select "Auto-detect" in the box of Transfer Type.

Second, start to upload your files to the web.  Press F4 to bring up the Site Manager, highlight your site, and then click Connect. When you have successfully logged into your account, a dialog window will pop up to let you know.

Click OK to remove the Login Messages window and view the file manage window.

To upload your files, highlight the file you wish to upload in the left window, and then click the Upload icon.  If you need to upload multiple files one time, hold the Ctrl key on the keyboard and meantime choose each file with mouse, and then click the Upload icon.

If you want to download file from the web to your local disk, just do the opposite as described above, that is, select files in the right window and click the Download icon.  

Please note: HTML filenames are case sensitive, and we recommend you upload your files in lowercase only.  When you write your html files, make sure any html and image files are in lowercase.  

Third, disconnect from the web, after successfully upload files to your website, by clicking the  Exit from FTP category on the top-left window. Your session profile will be saved automatically, and next time when you connect with CuteFTP,  no need to type again, just select the right profile.

Tips: If you have trouble connecting with or using CuteFTP after reviewing this tutorial, your best source of assistance is the CuteFTP Knowledge Base.

How to Use WS_FTP