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The Internet services that most people receive through their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) sometimes includes a modest amount of personal web space (PWS). You will have to find out from your ISP exactly what is including in your package. On the Internet, the address of this web space usually takes the form of:

http://www.ISP.com/~YourAccountName/ or http://www.ISP.com/YourAccountName/

where the http://www.ISP.com/ is the address of your ISP and YourAccountName is the username that your ISP assigns you and what you use to log onto the Internet. As an example, an ISP in St. Catharines, ON is vaxxine.com and they have a listing of their clients' web sites.

This personal web space allows you to put any file on the Internet. In your PWS, only files that are located in your public_html directory will be accessible to internet visitors. If you had your own domain name, files located in this root directory would be what visitors would find when they entered your "www" web address. In the public_html directory, you can create any number of subdirectories, and this would be advisable if you plan to be uploading a large number of files (including photos) to your PWS.

You need to acquire an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program for transferring the files on your home PC to your PWS. You can buy these programs or you can download a free program. Software manufacturers usually have a free version so that you can upgrade to the premium version once you realize how useful the free one is. However, the free version may serve your purposes quite well. Do a search for free FTP programs on the Internet to find what is currently available. Some free FTP programs:

Once you have your FTP program installed and running, you need to copy your files from your PC to your PWS. Start off by creating a new FTP site and setting your server to your ISP's web address. The user ID and password will be the same as what you are using now to log on to the internet. The FTP program will do the rest in getting you connected. Two windows will appear somewhere on the screen and usually the left window is your PC's source directory and the right window is your PWS directory. Depending upon your ISP's directory structure, the destination directory may appear like: /home/subscribers/YourAccountName/public_html/destination/. Once you have located both your source and destination directories, save your configuration so that the FTP program will go to them automatically upon startup.

Your ISP should have an on-line procedure for publishing personal web pages.  However, to have web site that works with both desktop and mobile devices, your content should be served from a content management system rather than static html (hypertext markup language) files, which your account may not allow.

 

Uploading Photos

Photos take a long time to load on a web page. With broadband internet connections, this isn't a problem (for you if you have one) but a lot of people still have dial-up connections and even one high resolution photo will take an eternity to load on a web page. Unless you have a very good reason for not doing so, limit the maximum resolution of Internet photos to 640 x 480 or 800 x 600. Always use JPEG (or JPG) format for photos, as well.

While digital cameras include this resolution, with storage being inexpensive, it is better to take photos at full resolution and then crop & resize the images as required.  For those of you with a Windows OS, there is also open-source program for photo resizing too (Image Resizer for Windows).