Building Your First Website: Day 7

Posted on January 14th, 2009 by Urbain

Note: The “building your first website” articles are written for mom and pop businesses who are building their own sites for the first time, and other newcomers to the Internet.

An essential piece of software that you will need is FTP software. FTP refers to “file transfer protocal” and will allow you to move images, templates and web pages to your website.

Even if you will be blogging only, FTP will be very useful for you in you wish to quickly upload images or templates to your server. This can be done from within WordPress (if you are using a WordPress blog) and from your control panel; however, the FTP software is much faster and is very easy to use.

There are hundreds of free FTP programs available. For the safest downloads, go to http://www.download.com, which is a service from CNet. Type “ftp” in the search box and select Windows or Mac, depending on what type of computer you have.

cnet-ftp-011

If you searched for software that is compatible with Windows, thousands of FTP programs will show up in the search results. On the left side of the screen, select the “free” option, as shown in the image below.

cnet-ftp-02

You’ll see that there are over 700 different free programs. I personally use WS-FTP; however, these programs all generally work the same. Check out the user ratings and/or number of downloads to determine what you think will work best for you. In the examples that will be shown in future posts on this blog, I’ll be using WS-FTP.

Your assignment today is to download and install an FTP program. CNET will provide download prompts and instructions that should make the process easy.

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