After you have finished creating your website and exporting it, there are a number of additional requirements and tasks you will need to complete in order to publish your website, so it’s available online.
Requirements
Below is a list of the additional requirements you will need in order to publish your web site.
Domain Name
A domain name is your website name. A domain name is the address where Internet users can access your website. A domain name is used for finding and identifying computers on the Internet. Computers use IP addresses, which are a series of numbers. However, it is difficult for humans to remember strings of numbers. Because of this, domain names were developed and used to identify entities on the Internet rather than using IP addresses.
A domain name can be any combination of letters and numbers, and it can be used in combination of the various domain name extensions, such as .com, .net and more.
The domain name must be registered before you can use it. Every domain name is unique. No two websites can have the same domain name. If someone types in www.yourdomain.com, it will go to your website and no one else’s.
When choosing a domain name, we recommend using words that are easy to spell, it’s also important to keep the domain name short and memorable.
Web Hosting
Web hosting is a service that allows organisations and individuals to post a website or web page onto the Internet. A web host, or web hosting service provider, is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for the website or webpage to be viewed on the Internet. Web sites are hosted, or stored, on special computers called servers.
When Internet users want to view your website, all they need to do is type your website address or domain into their browser. Their computer will then connect to your server and your web pages will be delivered to them through the browser.
Most hosting companies require that you own your domain in order to host with them. If you do not have a domain, the hosting companies will help you purchase one.
We recommend using good web hosting if you want your site to load fast, cheap hosting usually results in poor connection speeds.
FTP App
Once you have your domain name and hosting you will now need a special application to communicate with your hosting (server) in order to move the required files onto it. This application is referred to as an FTP Client. An FTP Client is designed to transfer files back-and-forth between two computers over the Internet. It needs to be installed on your computer and can only be used with a live connection to the Internet. With an FTP Client (such as Cyber Duck, Transmit or FileZilla) uploading/downloading a file is really easy.
Your web hosting provider will allow you to create special credentials for your server, the FTP application will require these credentials in order to connect with your server.
We recommend you try a free FTP client such as Cyber Duck to begin with, once you are a little more familiar with the way FTP applications work, we highly recommend trying out the premium FTP app Transmit.
Uploading To Hosting
Now you have your hosting set up and have connected to it using an FTP app, you will need to upload your exported Blocs project onto your server. When you export from Blocs, a new directory will be created on your hard drive, within this directory you will see many subdirectories and files such as index.html. These are the coded files that make up your website. Your server will require these files in order to display your web site when you enter your domain name into a web browser.
On your server there will be a special directory, usually named httpdocs. This directory is front facing which means anything that’s placed within this directory can potentially be accessed via a web browser. The name for this directory can be different depending on what operating system is in use on your server, so we recommend checking with your hosting provider to see what the correct name is.
Once you know the name and location of the httpdocs directory on your server, you need to use an FTP app to navigate to that directory on your server and then copy the entire contents of the export directory into it. It’s important that all subdirectories remain intact when you are copying files up to your server. The inside of the httpdocs directory should be a mirror image of the Blocs generated export directory located on your hard drive.
After you have uploaded your site to the server via FTP, it should now be available to view using a web browser, at the designated web address. If you encounter any issues with your site such as broken functionality or missing images, we recommend reading this knowledge base post that covers using the web inspector to identify and fix server side problems.
Web browsers have a mechanism build in referred to as caching which helps web pages load faster. On occasion you may find that your old web page design may continue to load, this is because it’s stored in the browser cache. Try clearing your browser cache in order to remedy the issue. We created this article to help with cache issues.