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.

Real estate and mailing addresses

You can think of hosting and a domain name like a building and a mailing address. As a building is a space that holds all of your stuff, hosting space is where you house your website files and other digital information.

But without a mailing address, the building (or people residing in the building) cannot be contacted by the outside world. In a similiar way, people cannot easily connect to a website if it doesn’t have a domain name associated with it.

People with name tags

My friend Micah sent over this analogy.

You can also think of hosting and a domain name as a person with a name tag. Without the name tag, other people can not address that person. In a similiar way, without a domain name, an Internet user can not easily find a website.

Also, just as a name tag can be swapped among different people, a domain name can be swapped between different hosts. For instance, if you own a domain name and have hosting, you can take that domain name and use it with a different host.

I hope those help (and don’t cause any more confusion)! Do you have your own analogy? Feel free to submit it as a comment below.

1) Click on the ‘New site …’ option in the ‘Site’ dropdown menu.

2) In the new window, make sure that the “Advanced” tab toward the top of the window is selected. I find that the “Advanced” configuration is actually a bit easier than the “Basic” configuration. You’ll be in the “Local Info” section where we’ll need to set the following options:

Site Name: Whatever you’d like to refer to your site as. This is for your own identification.
Local Root Folder: Select the folder on your computer where you’d like to store or are currently storing your site’s files.
Default Images Folder: This is the folder on your computer that contains the images that you are or will be using for your site. If you are going to select a folder, the folder needs to be within the Local Root Folder. But you don’t need to select a Default Images Folder if you don’t want to.

The other fields (HTTP Address and Enable Cache) aren’t necessary.

3) Now select the “Remote Info” category to the left of the window. We’ll need to set some more options:

Access: Select “FTP” from the dropdown list.
FTP Host: ftp.mydomain.com (If you’re domain name hasn’t resolved yet, you can use ftp.okpublic.com here instead).
Host Directory: public_html/
Login: (This is the username that you selected when you signed up for an OKPublic account. It should also be contained in the “Domain Account Activation” email that should have received when your account was setup.)
Password: (This password is contained in the FTP section of the “Domain Account Activation” email that should have received when your account was setup. If you didn’t receive it or you are unsure about what to use here, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help).

You can check the “Automatically upload files to server on save” option if you’d like to upload the file you’re working on each time you save. I personally don’t like to do this as I save a lot while I’m working on a page and I don’t want to put the file on the server each time I save. It’s up to you though.

That’s it! Click on the “Test” button to make sure all of the settings are correct. If you get an error, run through the above steps again and don’t hesitate to contact us if you’re still having problems.

What is FTP? Here is a quick definition from Wikipedia:

“FTP or File Transfer Protocol is used to connect two computers over the Internet so that the user of one computer can transfer files and perform file commands on the other computer.”

So in order to use FTP, you first need to obtain an FTP client or software program. We recommend Filezilla as it’s:

• Open Source (Free!)
• Easy to use
• Updated often

You can download Filezilla here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=21558
(For our purposes, it’s best to get the non-Beta version of the program or stable version.)

Once you download and install the program (the default options that Filezilla specifies during installation will work fine), start it up and you’ll see an interface that looks similar to the one below. Click on the computer icon as shown below:

The below screen will come up. Click on the “New Site” button as shown by the arrow below (click on the image to view the full-size version):

Now you need to enter in the details for the new FTP site that were contained in the email you should have received that contained the subject line: “Domain Account Activation”. You need to substitute mydomain.com, myusername, and mypassword with your own information contained in that email.
You can view the image below to determine where that information needs to be placed in Filezilla:

• Host: ftp.mydomain.com (If the domain name that you are using is for example a .net extension, then it would be ftp.mydomain.net).
• Servertype: FTP
• Logontype: normal
• User: myusername
• Password: mypassword
  

When you’ve finishing filling in that information, click on the advanced tab as shown above.

The settings in the Advanced window should be:

• Default local directory: This should be the path to where you store or would like to store the files that you want to put up with your website. Click on the
• Default remote directory: public_html/ (This is your directory on the server that is accessible by the web)

Once you’re done with that, click on the “Save and Exit” button back at the main screen.

That should do it! Now you can connect to your site and upload files from your computer to it.

For more detailed information on how to use Filezilla specifically, you can visit the Filezilla Documentation area.