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When you're ready to publish your document to the Web, Freeway will build all the required
files into your destination folder. If you need to
change your destination folder at any point, you can
use the File/Document Setup command to do so.
If you want to view what your site looks like in
a Web browser as you're working, Freeway also needs to build the entire site at that point,
again building it all into the destination folder. In
order that the folder doesn't become clogged up
with out-of-date files, Freeway ensures that any
files which are no longer needed for the site are removed each time you build your site.
The two commands which build your site in the above fashion are the
Publish Site command and the Preview
command.
Before you preview your site for the first
time, you may set the Preview options. This allows
you to select from the available browsers on your system the one Freeway will launch automatically.
- Choose File/Preview/Preview Setup...
- Freeway displays a list of browsers on
your system and shows a tick next to the default browser.
- Click Add... to locate a
browser yourself.
- Click on a browser to select it and
then click Delete to remove it.
- Click on a browser to select it and
then click Edit... to locate it with the file selector.
- Click on a browser to select it and
then click Default to select it as a preferred browsers
- Click the Update button to search
your system for other browsers.
- Click OK to confirm your selections.
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The Preview command builds the site, launches a Web browser and then displays your pages
using this browser. It is a quick way to see what
you designs look like on the Web. It is also
necessary to do this if you wish to view multimedia
content which has been imported onto your pages.
Select File/Preview.... and select a browser
from the list in the submenu.
Note: Alternatively, you can use the short
cut Command + Option + P which will launch the default browser.
Freeway exports the necessary HTML files into the selected folder, launches the browser
and displays the current page of your document.
To return to your document, click on any
visible part of the Freeway window, or choose
Freeway from the application menu in the top right of
your screen. You can use the Preview command as often as you like.
The Preview command is useful if you want to view your work in a browser, but if you
simply want to create the site, you can use the
Publish Site command. You would use this command
to export changes in your Freeway document to the site folder:
Choose File/Publish Site.
Freeway exports any files which have changed due to editing done in the Freeway document,
but does not switch into a Web browser.
Your Web document design may use the same graphic on several pages. For example, you
might use the same image of a button on different
pages. When Freeway builds the site, images are
checked as they are exported to see if they dulplicate
a graphic which has already been exported. If Freeway detects an identical duplicate, the
second instance of the graphic is not exported, but
instead a reference to the first instance is inserted into
the HTML code.
For example, if the same image appears in
several places throughout a document, Freeway
exports only the first one it comes across and
then "reuses" it on subsequent pages. This means
that the number of files a visitor needs to download
is reduced, and the performance of the Web site is increased.
Whenever you make changes to the original Freeway document, you will need to rebuild
the site so these changes are reflected in the
site destination folder.
When you change the contents of a page, or
create a new one, the Site palette displays a bullet
point beside its name in the palette to show that it
needs to be rebuilt.
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Freeway provides a file name for each of the
items you create on the page, and will never generate
a duplicate file name since this would result in
one file overwriting another when the site is built.
You can influence the file name by naming the item with a new title in the Item panel while the item
is selected, but the filename you use isn't
guaranteed to be used if the image duplicates another
one which has already been built.
Although you are creating your Web site in Freeway using a Macintosh, the files for your
Web site can be uploaded to servers which run on
other computer operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Windows NT or UNIX. These
other operating environments may impose specific
file naming requirements and the names of files created by Freeway must conform to
these requirements. The Document Setup dialog box provides an option which controls
whether Freeway will use DOS (8.3) file names. If
you choose this option, Freeway will automatically generate filenames which conform with
the restrictions on 8.3 filenames.
The Site Palette can be set to display the file
sizes after the Web site has been built. Choose
Show File Sizes from the Site palette popout menu.
It's a good idea to use this to check how large
your pages are getting. The file sizes are displayed
in bytes, and as a very crude approximation you
can assume that in actual use most people will be getting an average of about a thousand bytes
(or about 1Kb) per second. This means that a page that is 17,000 bytes will take about
seventeen seconds to download in its entirety.
As a rule of thumb, if an ordinary page is over 32,000 bytes, this is probably too large
(unless your content is exceptionally compelling) and
you should either use the image control options to reduce the file sizes of the images on the
page, split the content into two separate pages, or
at least warn visitors that the site is graphics intensive before they load the larger pages.
Unless the content of your site is exceptionally compelling, it's unlikely that visitors will
wait more than 30 seconds to see the graphic
content download. Make sure that the wait is worth
their while, or they probably won't come back!
When you use the Preview command in Freeway to view your page in the browser, the entire site
is automatically published into the destination folder.
Publishing your site is therefore simply a matter
of ensuring that the destination folder is up to
date with any last minute changes you may have
made since the last time you previewed the site.
Using either the Preview command or the Publish command will cause the destination folder to
be brought up-to-date - the only difference
between the Publish command and the Preview
command is that the Preview command builds the site
then launches a browser and opens the HTML version of the current page in the document.
Your site is now contained in the destination folder, and the next stage is to upload the files
to your Web space. Unless you have a Web server on your internal network, you are going to need
to use a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client to make
a connection to your Web space and transfer the files from your local hard disk.
The two FTP clients in common use are Fetch
and Anarchie - these are both shareware utilities
and are easily located on the Internet or on
magazine cover CDs. If you rent an Internet connection
from an Internet Service Provider (ISP), they may
also have supplied an FTP client with the original software bundle they gave you.
In order to make the connection to your Web space, you need to know a URL, a username
and password. If in doubt about what these should
be, you need to speak to either your Web server system administrator or the support helpline
of your ISP, who will be able to give you this information.
Once the connection is open, you can simpy open the destination folder, select the entire
contents and drag them into the window of your FTP
client - alternatively, you can use a command in the
FTP client to upload the entire contents of the destination folder.
When using either utility, you must be careful
not to alter the filenames or relative locations of
any of the content of the destination folder,
otherwise links between pages or to objects in your site
will be broken. You need to ensure that the FTP
client is set to transfer your files as "Raw Data" or
the equivalent. Often, you'll find the default is set
to MacBinary, which will cause problems with the files, and/or the filenames.
NOTE 1 - See the support area of the
SoftPress Web site for detailed intructions on using
Fetch and Anarchie.
NOTE 2 - There is a single exception to the
rule that you must upload the entire contents of Freeway's destination folder - the file
_siteinfo is not required, and can be omitted if so
desired without adverse consequence.
Publishing your site is only the start of the process. One of the most important advantages
of Web publishing over conventional paper printing is the ease with which information can be
updated. Many large Web sites are updated daily.
Regular updates will encourage readers to revisit your site.
It is unlikely that you will want to alter every
page in your Web site at one time. At most you
will want to update one or two pages. Freeway
allows you to do this easily. If you are changing only
one or two files, you will want to keep track of the
old files so that you will need to transfer only
the changed files. One way of distinguishing
between old and newly created files is to label the old
files using the Macintosh Finder facility which
allows you to add a color to the file icon. In the
Finder, before you build the updated site, select all
the files in the destination folder and label them
with a color. After you have altered pages in
Freeway and rebuilt the site, Freeway creates new files
for the altered pages only. Pages without any
changes are not exported. When you look again at the
Web site folder, you will easily be able to
distinguish the new files which need transferring to the
Web server because they will not be labelled.
Another possible way of tracking files is to display the folder by date. The most recent
files are those that have been newly created.
Using a combination of these methods helps you to work with only the files which have
been created recently by Freeway.
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