Introduction

This article defines what it means to publish with the Microsoft® FrontPage® 2000 Web site creation and management tool and discusses your choices of where to create and host your site. The article gives you step-by-step instructions on how to publish with FrontPage 2000 and highlights the differences in publishing with FrontPage 98 and FrontPage 2000. If you're new to FrontPage 2000 or you've been publishing using FrontPage 98, you'll find answers to many of your questions about publishing here.

What does it mean to publish a Web site using Microsoft FrontPage?

First of all, it's important to understand what a Web site is. A "Web" is a group of files that are interconnected by hyperlinks that allow you to jump from one page to another, usually by simply clicking your mouse. While it's possible for a Web site to be a single HTML page, a Web site usually comprises several pages that can include images, hyperlinks, and more advanced technology like forms and databases.

Publishing a Web site generally means copying all of the files that make up a Web site to a particular destination. In FrontPage, you would typically publish your site when you want to:

• Make your site (or new or updated pages on your site) available for public viewing. Normally you create or update pages for your Web site in a location (often referred to as a "staging" area) where others cannot find or view the pages with their Web browser. When you are ready to let others view your Web site on the World Wide Web or on your company intranet, you would use the FrontPage publishing feature to copy the files to the Web server.
• Make a backup of your site. There may be times when you want to make a copy or a backup of your Web site and save it to a particular location on a your computer or on a network drive. The publishing feature in FrontPage is a convenient way to make a backup.
  
  Publishing to a Web server, whether it is on the World Wide Web or on your company network (intranet), provides some important benefits:
• Ensures that others cannot modify your pages unless they have authoring privileges. You may have noticed that you can open an HTML file (normally with the extension .htm or .html) in your browser and use the "View Source" command to see the underlying code and text. When you do this with HTML files that you access through your file system, you can modify and save changes to the file. However, if you view the source of a file that is published to a Web server (the file displays an http:// prefix in your browser address line), it seems like you can change the source, but you cannot actually save your changes.
• Keeps your links and images working correctly. FrontPage will maintain your files and hyperlinks. Each time you publish the Web site, FrontPage compares the files on your local computer to the files on the Web server. For example, if you move a file in your local Web site, FrontPage will update and correct any hyperlinks to it, and then make the same corrections to the files on the Web server the next time you publish the Web.
• Enables server-dependent features. Certain features such as forms, searches, databases, and discussion groups require a Web server in order to work. If you add these types of features to your Web, you'll find that they simply don't work when viewing your pages directly from a file location on your hard-drive or a network file location. But when you publish to a location with a Web server, these server-dependent features will work because they have the server software to add the "smarts."