After you have ordered hosting and you have your domain name ready to go with OK Public, naturally you may be wondering: what’s next? This article will help guide you through the next leg of your website journey.

There are a few different scenarios that we’ll go through. If you find that a section isn’t applicable to you, skip to the next one.

Before proceeding, make sure that you have an email from us with “Domain Activation Email” in the title handy. You should have received this email after you signed up for hosting. If you didn’t receive the email, check your spam and junk mail folders to make sure the email wasn’t accidentally filtered by your email client or email provider. If it’s not in there, email us at support@okpublic.com to let us know and we will get back to you ASAP.

You Have a Set of Files for Your Website on Your Computer

These might be files that you’ve created in a text editor or in a website editor like Dreamweaver or CoffeeCup.

The best approach to get these files displaying as your website at your domain is to transfer the files to your webhosting space using an FTP client. If you’re familiar with using an FTP client, you can use authentication information in your Domain Account Activation email to connect to your hosting space and transfer the files.

If you’re not familiar with FTP, don’t worry, it’s actually very easy to use and basically allows you to easily connect two computers together (your computer and the web server computer) so you can transfer files between the two. We have a step by step guide for using a popular FTP program called FileZilla to accomplish the above.

You Don’t Have a Set of Files and You Would Like to Jump In and Start Adding Content for Your Website

You’re adventurous. You learn by doing, trying new things and then correcting your course if you take a wrong turn.

The best bet then would be to use the “File Manager” option which is available in your control panel. You will find a link to your control panel as well as the authentication information in your Domain Account Activation email. Once you login, look for the “File Manager” link under the “Files” section and click through.

You will enter what looks like an Explorer or Finder view similar to what you use on your computer to navigate folders and files. It works the same way. Click on directories to view the contents of them and click on files to select them for editing, deleting or renaming. When you select a file and the file is checked, you can then click on the “Edit” button at the top of the page to edit the contents of the file. Click on the HTML Editor to be able to easily create HTML in the file without using any code.

If you get stuck, Google is your friend in learning how to code HTML and how to do things like work images and hyperlinks into your website.

Keep in mind that the files that are displayed at your domain reside in the “public_html” directory that you’ll see in the File Manager. So if you create the file “/public_html/test.html” then you will be able to view that file through your web browser at http://www.yourdomain.com/test.html.

Also keep in mind that the file that corresponds to what is displayed at the base of your domain (http://www.yourdomain.com/) is the index.html (or index.htm) file in your public_html directory.

You Don’t Have a Set of Files on Your Computer and Instead of Jumping Into Creating the Files You Would Like to Use Something Out of the Box to Get Started

In this case, we highly recommend using an open source content management application to get going. In particular we recommend using WordPress (it’s not just for blogging sites) for the following reasons:

• It’s very easy to use
• It’s powerful enough to allow you to build additional features into it down the line
• There’s a huge and friendly community of people that use and support WordPress. If you need a hand with your WordPress site you won’t have to look far to find someone that is familiar with working with it

We have a 6-step guide for easily installing WordPress here.

You Have a Web Designer or Developer That is Going to Setup the Site for You

Sounds good! All you have to do in this case is forward over the Domain Account Activation email to her and she should be ready to roll.

If you don’t fit into any of these categories or if you have any questions, please contact us here.

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