Part I: Overview

Web site: A location on the Internet or World Wide Web. It refers to a body of information as a whole. A Web site is made up of Web pages.

Web page: The most technically correct usage is for a single HTML file that contains text and images, is part of a Web site, and has an individual file name assigned to it.

Server or Web server: A host computer on a network. It houses information and responds to requests for information (for example, it houses Web sites and executes their links to other Web sites).

Upload: To copy a file from your local computer to a server or host system; the reverse process of download.

FTP: File Transfer Protocol-- A standard method for downloading and uploading files over the Internet. With FTP, you can login to a server and transfer files (meaning you can "send" or "receive" files).

HTML: Hyper-Text Markup Language-- HTML is a mark-up language (versus a programming language) that uses coded commands, called tags, to structure text. It tells a Web browser how to display text and images. You can see a Web page's HTML code if you select "view source" from the View menu in your Web browser.

There are two essential steps to creating a Web site for your municipality or school.

1. You must create the Web pages on your computer.
2. You must upload those pages to the RINET server.

In order to create the pages, you will need to know HTML and/or have access to a piece of software that allows you to create and edit Web Pages visually (eg. Dreamweaver, GoLive, etc.)

Web Servers distinguish between upper and lower case filenames. For example, "INFO.HTML" is regarded as a different file to "info.html". To avoid problems, many developers make sure that hyperlinks (web pages and images) in the documents have filenames in lower case. Make sure your files are uploaded to the server in lower case.

A Web search for "HTML tutorial" will turn up plenty of sites. One basic HTML Tutorial is available at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/
Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive and other software packages are available at any major software retailer.

NOTE: RINET server does not support Frontpage extensions.

Once you have created a Web page or pages, they need to be uploaded to the RINET Web server. This can be accomplished by one of two methods. You can either use the built-in upload/FTP feature of your HTML editor, or you can use a free (shareware) FTP client such as Win_FTP. See RINET document: FTP and Uploading Files.