PROFESSIONAL WEBSITE TEMPLATES - FTP 101:

In the last article Hosting and Domains you learned a little about making your site live via purchasing a domain and a hosting site. This article teaches you a little more about FTP even though the last article touched on it a little, I would like to go into it more so you know what people mean when they say "FTP it to me" or "Just upload it using FTP."

Just to reiterate, FTP is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol. Its a method in which you upload or download files to an internet location, usually the hosting company you signed up with. Its just a fancy way of saying transferring your files from your computer to the server hosting or storing your site.

So although thats the method of transferring your files, you need a program or application that uses that method to transfer the files for you. In other words you know how to send email, but you may not know how the email protocol actually sends it through the internet since you just use an email client like Outlook, Apple Mail, or Entourage right? Same with FTP, many people don't know how the FTP protocol works because they use an FTP client to do it for them. On the users end they just see an easy to use interface that connects to their server and allows the user to just drag and drop their files to their hosting server.

When you setup your domain name and hosting site, the domain name gets programmed from the hosting company to "point" any web surfers that type in "yourdomain.com" to actually pull up the files that you just uploaded.

Some of the popular FTP applications or programs I found were CuteFTP for Windows and Fetch or Transmit for Mac OS X. These programs allow you to setup one or more connections to hosting companies or servers and then give you an interface to upload or download files to them.

FTP is also becoming popular in sending files in general for reasons other than websites. For example, I've sent many files to FTP sites for clients of mine to download for their review. If you need to send a file (Pictures, Movies, Programs, Music, etc) to others over the web and those files are too big to email so you use FTP to send it to an FTP site.

Creating an FTP site nowadays is actually pretty simple. Since you need to upload or download your files from a actual location on the web, you still need to find a server on the internet that will store the files for you. Most hosting companies have a menu option to set this up. Once you setup a n FTP site which is basically a folder on your hosting companies server with a username and password (which you too setup). You give the user you want the web address or url and the username and password to access the folder to upload or download the files in that folder. You can also give permissions for users to create new folders, delete folders or files, etc in that FTP folder.

If you still need further information or help with this, please feel free to email me and I'll try to help you as much as possible.