Making a File Available for DownloadingNow that you know the scoop about getting your web pages online, it's worth addressing another issue closely related to publishing HTML files. I'm referring to files other than web pages that you want to make available online. Whether it's a ZIP file containing your art portfolio, or an Excel spreadsheet with sales numbers, it's often useful to publish files on the Internet that aren't web pages. To make a file available on the Web that isn't a web page, just upload the file to your web site as if it were an HTML file, following the instructions earlier in this hour for uploading. After the file is uploaded to the web server, you need to create a link to the file on one of your web pages, as explained in Hour 3, "Linking to Other Web Pages." For example, if the file were called artfolio.zip, the link would look like this: <a href="artfolio.zip">Click here to download my art portfolio.</a> Remember that some web host services charge by the number of bytes sent out, so you need to be careful about posting huge multimegabyte files if a lot of people will be downloading them. For example, if 10,000 people a day download a 2MB file from your site, it might start costing you some serious money and overburden your web server. Of course, short of your creating the next Yahoo! or eBay, that's a lot of traffic for a web site by most normal standards. And at that point you should be cashing in on some advertising revenue if you have that many site visitors! |