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FrontPage Site Setup and Maintenance

Goal for this lesson Key Concept Creating a New FrontPage "Personal" Web Publish your new site to the server Import an existing FrontPage Web from your server Opening an existing FrontPage Web on a Different Computer Important Note about Using Multiple Computers Goal for this lesson Set up a new site and create two subdirectories, with a few linked pages. Upload this new site to the server. Back to the top. Key Concept FrontPage organizes all web content that it creates into what are called FrontPage Webs.  A "FrontPage Web" is a folder (on your local computer)  or directory (on a server) containing all the files necessary for a web site.  A FrontPage Web can either be disk-based (that is, stored on the local computer that you are using to create your web pages) or server-based, that is stored on a Web server.  When you start to create your web pages, they will reside in a folder on your local computer, and will be disk-based. When the pages are "published" to the server, then they will be accessible to the world from the Web server. To be able to publish your web pages to a server, the server needs to have a FrontPage Web defined. Each FrontPage Web can contain any number of subWebs.  Technically, any FrontPage Webs you develop in WIT are actually subWebs of the one FrontPage Web contained on the WIT FrontPage server. When your account was created on the WIT FrontPage server, a home directory was created with the address http://scook.webinstituteforteachers.org/~USERNAME where "USERNAME" is the username assigned to you. Please ask your mentor if you don't know your username. (To publish your files to your USERNAME account, you will also need a password, supplied to you at the beginning of JWIT.) In order to create a web site, you need to create a temporary place to store the files as you're working on them. This temporary place will be a folder on your local  computer. By default, FrontPage offers to save any FrontPage Webs that you create to a folder called My Webs which is a subfolder of the My Documents folder.  Unless there is a reason NOT to accept the default location, it makes sense to store all of your web pages there. However, FrontPage uses "my web" as a default name for the first FrontPage Web you create.  Don't accept this default. Instead, give the folder a descriptive name such as My First Web Site or something like that.  (Folder names can have spaces and even some punctuation in them.) BEFORE WE GO ON: Please make sure you have: The URL of your directory on the WIT FrontPage server  ("URL" stands for "Uniform Resource Locator," and means the web address, such as http://scook.webinstituteforteachers.org/~USERNAME. Your username Your password   Back to the top. Creating a New FrontPage "Personal" Web Launch FrontPage. If you have already created a FrontPage Web and were working on it last time you shut FrontPage down, FrontPage will automatically load that Web. Don't worry about that. Use File | New.  The Task Pane opens to "New": Choose More Web site Templates.  The following box opens: Under Options | Specify the location of the web, click the browse button. You'll get: Click "My Documents" then double-click "My Webs," then press the new folder icon on the upper right of the dialog box: . A new folder is created. Now type a name for the folder, something like "My first web site". Then click OK and then Open.  Then choose "Personal Web" from this dialog: and then click OK. FrontPage will create a new personal web site in the location you specified.  It will look like this: Notice that several folders and files have been created for you.  This is what the "Personal Web" template does for you.  Double click the index.htm file to open it and see that FrontPage has already formatted the page and left places for your personal information:  We'll fill the rest of this in in the next lesson.  For now, just type your name onto the page, and then use File | Save to save the file.  Then use File | Close. Publish your new site to the server Now it is time to upload your "personal web" to the WIT server.  (Note that normally you would add more specific content to the pages before publishing, but we want to jump to this topic so you can begin to work more on your own.) Publishing from FrontPage to the server is EASY as PIE. First,  click "Web Site" in the bar at the top of your page window. This shows your website window, shown below. In the view bar at the bottom of this window, click "Remote Web Site".  This view below opens. The instructions in the middle say "Click "Remote Web Site Properties..." to set up a remote site. That is in the top of your view and looks like this.   You do that and this next window opens.  (You can also get to this point directly to this by using File | Publish Web) Make sure the "FrontPage or SharePoint Services" is selected. Then type in the "Remote Web site location" field:  http://scook.webinstituteforteachers.org/~USERNAME   . (Be sure to replace "USERNAME" with your own username.  The http:// is REQUIRED. Click OK.  Another dialog box will open that will ask you for your username and password:   Type them in the box. (NOTE: your password is case-sensitive.)  If you are using a "public" computer (that is, one that may be used at some time by someone else, then DO NOT check the "Save this password in your password list" because otherwise ANYONE can alter your web site from this computer. (On your home computer, checking this box will save you time later.)  Since during WIT you may be moving from one computer to another (indeed, you're going to do that later), leave this Unchecked.  Click OK.  The window below will open, and you are ready to publish. Notes: The left window is local, what you have on your computer.  The right window is what is in your folder on the server at the University.  Your right window will probably be empty. There are three standard icons above the upper right corner of each window.  They are Refresh, Next Level Up, and Delete.  Be careful of Delete, because it does not send to recycle, it deletes permanently.  (The Next Level Up icon works only if you have rights to go up.) To publish,  look at the lower right corner of your window.  There,  make sure the "Local to remote" button is clicked.  Then click "Publish Web site" . If you want to publish only part of your website, select the files or folders and use the blue arrows between the windows.   (Selecting a file or folder will light up those arrows.) Note: the arrows work in the direction they are pointing.  The bottom set, which points both ways, will compare your files according to date, and synchronize your folders so that both local and remote have the files with the most recent dates.

Back to the top.

Opening an existing FrontPage Web on a Different Computer

Why would you want to open an existing FrontPage Web on a different computer?

1. You want to work on the same web from your home and work computers
2. You are working in an open lab and the computer you've used previously is unavailable or malfunctioning
3. You just want to make a few changes on an existing FrontPage web and don't want to download the whole thing.  (#3 is probably not necessary because you can always "import" your site.  The "import" process is less confusing.)

There are three ways you may want to do this: 

1. Import the site,
2. Open and work on the site on the server, or
3. Open the site on the server and publish it down to your computer.
   

Import a Website

You now have an empty local website folder (except for those two folders put there by FrontPage), and a list of files and folders on the remote site.  In the lower right corner, select "Remote to Local", click the publish button, and your web site will be copied from the remote folder to your local folder.

Opening an existing FrontPage Web on a Different Computer

To work on the FrontPage Web on the server without copying it to your local hard drive, follow the instructions labeled Part A.

If you work on the server and then want to make a complete new copy of your FrontPage web onto your local drive, then follow both Part A and Part B of these instructions.

Part A

	Move to a different computer (one that you have not used to create your FrontPage web so far).
	The first thing to do is to "Open" the remote web into FrontPage.
	Use File | Open Site ....  The following dialog box opens:

	Type the URL into the Web Name field at the bottom of the dialog box: (Site name:)  http://scook.webinstituteforteachers.org/~USERNAME.  Be sure to replace USERNAME with your own user name.  Click Open.
	If FrontPage asks for your username and password type them in and click OK	.
	This will take a few moments, but soon your web will open.  It will look like this:

Notice that instead of a local folder name at the top of the folder list, there is your URL.  This indicates that the web still "lives" on the server and not on your hard drive.

At this point, if you don't want to make a copy on your local computer, you can simply work on the files while leaving them stored on the server. The only different from working locally is that when you save your files, they will be saved to the server automatically.  There is no need to "publish" your web if you use this method. This is the method of choice if you just want to make some small changes to your Web.  (Skip Part B.)

If, on the other hand, you want to create a copy of the FrontPage web on your local hard drive, continue to Part B.

Back to the top.

Part B

	To save the files to your local hard drive, you need to "publish" them down from the server.  This is a little counter-intuitive.  "Publish" usually means to upload the files to the server.  But FrontPage uses the same word--"publish"--to mean a full site transfer in either direction.  We say we are "publishing up" to the server or "publishing down" to the local hard drive.
	Use File | Publish site.	..
	. In the "Remote web site location" field, you will enter a path to a local folder. The easiest way to do this is to use the Browse button and browse to your My Documents/My Webs directory.   You will also need to select  "File System", just above that field.
	You can either publish the Web over an existing copy of the Web (which is like "updating" the Web), or publish it to a new directory--in which case, use the icon to create a new folder with the name of your web, thus:

	Click OK, then click Open.  When FrontPage says there is no FrontPage web at that location and asks whether you would like to create one, click Yes.
	At this point, the Publish dialog box will open with the contents of the server folder at the university in the localwill be called the Remote Web site. Web Site window) The RIGHT (showing contents of your local hard drive folder)
	Pay attention to the arrows  and the description of what they do.  You are publishing from local, which is on the server, to remote, which is on your computer.  Select local to remote, and click publish.

The transfer process will be shown to the left under status, and a  report will be there after the process is completed.

Important Note about Using Multiple Computers

While FrontPage is a smart program, it's not that smart.  The program has no way of knowing if you have changed your FrontPage web using a different computer from the one you are now working on.  Consider the following scenario:

You work on a new FrontPage web from your work computer and Publish it to the WIT server.  When you get home, you Publish it "down" to your home hard drive, then work on the Web some more and Publish the changes "up" to the server.  You go to work the next day and want to work on the Web again.  However, some of the files on your work hard drive are now out of date with what's on the actual Web.  What do you do?

You can simply re-publish the whole Web from the newly updated version to the older version.  Just Publish it over the old copy (that is, into the same directory). (When you do this, you publish you may get a warning that the navigation structure or something is different on the local version and the server version.  Just let FrontPage "merge" the navigation structures. It will figure out which one is more recent.)

But what if you have made changes on both the local hard drive and the server?

Then you  need to manually copy the changed files from the server to your hard drive or vice-versa. How do you do that?

	On your work computer, use File | Publish Web... and enter your username and password (if necessary).
	DO NOT click the PUBLISH button.
	Instead, you must find the updated files on the server and copy them to your local hard drive.
	Look at this screen:

Notice the column headings on each side of the screen.  The files on the left are the ones on your local hard drive.  The files on the right are the ones on the server.

	To sort the files by the date they were last modified, click the "Modified" column heading on both sides of the screen.  (You may need to click it twice so the newer files are at the top of the listing.)
	If any of the files on the RIGHT have newer dates than the ones on the left, you need to select them, and use the appropriate arrow to copy them.  Do this for every file that is newer on the server.
	There may also be newer files in the subdirectories on the server.  To open the subdirectories, double-click on them (both sides) and again click or double-click the Modified heading to see which files on the server are newer.
	When you're done, click Cancel.

Back to the top.

Next Lesson (Themes).