Instructions and tips for

making your Home Page

When you sign up with PTCNET you have the ability to create your own home page. You get from 500k-to 1m bytes of space for free, and can get an additional 5 mega-bytes for $5 per month.

Keep in mind that PTCNET is simply providing storage space for your Web files. Creating the Web files is up to you. If you are interested in other Web services such as having a registered domain name and having a Web site created and maintained for you, send email to info@ptcnet.net, or call (402)-329-6225 or (888) 329-6225.

This page and the links herein have been written to offer PTCNET customers all the resources necessary to take advantage of their right and ability to create and store Home Pages on the PTCNET server. Having your very own *presence on the Web* can be exciting and fun. And thanks to PTCNET you, as our valued customer, now have that capability.

However, PTCNET offers only *limited* technical assistance in creating or uploading your personal html files. 

If, after reading the following information and exploring the resources that are referenced from this page you still have questions or problems with either creating or uploading your Web files, then feel free to email info@ptcnet.net or call your area PTCNET representative.

The first step in creating your own Web page is writing or creating one or more HTML files and store them on the hard drive (or a floppy diskette) of your own computer. These files are essentially nothing more than text files stored in ASCII format but have special "tags" inserted in them so that the file can be displayed within the context of a Web browser such as the Netscape Navigator, or Microsoft Internet Explorer. HTML stands for hypertext markup language. Don’t let the word "language" intimidate you. HTML is not a computer programming language but more like a "sculpturing" toolkit which allows you to present text, pictures and multi-media on your Web page in the fashion that you want. For more information on HTML please refer to one of the best sources of information on HTML, the Beginner’s Guide to HTML.

Once you have your Web files created on your computer the second step is to *upload*, or transfer them from your computer to our server here at PTCNET. Once they are in the proper place on our server then anyone with access to the World Wide Web has the opportunity and ability to view your personal Web pages.

Instruction for Uploading your Web Files

i. Get an FTP Client. An FTP client is a program that you can run on your computer to transfer files from one computer to another over the Internet. FTP simply stand for File Transfer Program but so many times refers to File Transfer Protocol, the protocol or rules followed for transferring files over the Internet. You must have an FTP program on your computer in order to *upload* (transfer a copy of) your Web files from your computer to our server. 

ii. There are a variety of freeware and shareware FTP clients available for you to download from the Web but we recommend that you use the program called ws_ftp (available in both 16 and 32 bit versions). Use the 16-bit version if you are using Windows 3.x and the 32-bit version if you have Windows 95/98.

a. Experienced users can download ws_ftp. Novices, or anyone interested in a description of the program and how to use it should go to the Junod Software page.

Macintosh users can use a popular Mac FTP client called Fetch.

iii. FTP and open www.ptcnet.net and log in.

iv. Login uses your username and password.

v. The password you use to connect to PTCNET is the password you use to establish the ftp connection.

vi. Once you are connected to our server via your FTP client change to your home directory. cd \ptcnet\xxxxxx. This is your home directory.

vii. Put all your home page files your home directory.

viii. Your home page, or main page, *has* to be named default.htm or index.htm or index.html in order for it to be accessible from the Web. Note: Windows 3.x users are limited to 3 letter extensions for their filenames. Thus, .html is not a valid extensions these computers. But the ws_ftp program allows renaming of files once they are on our server.

ix. You can now view your Home Page by pointing your Web browser to http://www.ptcnet.net/xxxxxx.

x. If you want to make changes to any of your Web pages, edit the html files that are on *your computer* and upload the changed files again to your home directory on our server (www.ptcnet.net) and the old files on our server will be overwritten by the newly edited files that you upload. If you want to view the new page from the Web using your Web browser be sure to *reload* or *refresh* your browser so that you are viewing the most current document.

Have fun creating your Web pages

and…

Thank you for choosing PTCNET.