I cannot figure out how to publish my site. I wrote the code myself for an online college course, but I am still learning. The sight comes up right whenever I preview it, but I cannot find the publish button in the Text Editor. Please help ASAP. Thanks!
These on-line college courses should start teaching a little more than just coding. They need to teach a little bit about how web server work. Not seeing your pages, is probably not a "publishing" issue.
"Publishing", in a web server sense, is an over used word that simply means putting your web pages on the web server. Some design tools use FTP, others HTTP, and there are several more. How it actually gets there is not very important. What's important is that it is on your web site.
Unless your dealing with the Website Wizards, there is no staging area where your files are kept, waiting to be uploaded (published) to the server. The files that you see from the File Manager is your web site and these files are accessible from the internet.
By default, when a visitor uses your URL (like www.yourwebsite.com), the web server looks for a file named "index.html" in the root directory of your web site. This is considered your home page. If it doesn't find that file it looks for "index.htm". Failing that, at least on Bravenet, it looks for "home.html". If it doesn't find any of those files, it usually give an error message. The web server does not look any further than the root directory for your home page.
If you have a file that is named something else, like "something.html", you can still access it by adding name to your web site URL. Like "www.yourwebsite.com/something.html". If it's in a subdirectory, you will need to specify that as well, like "www.yourwebsite.com/somedir/something.html".
When you update a web page, an then try to view the changes, users often don't see the changes. This is caused by your web browser. Your browser stores frequently visited web sites in memory. To force and update, and see your changes, force a couple of browser refreshes (F5 or Ctr-R), when your viewing your site. I usually use two or three.
Browser: Firefox, Netscape, Sea Monkey, Internet Explorer, .....
