What's the difference between uploading files to a Web site using Publish Web versus using a standalone FTP utility?

If you work with FrontPage and your Web site resides on a server without the FrontPage Server Extensions—meaning that it's probably a Unix or Linux server—FrontPage's Publish Web feature can help you maintain your site more efficiently and conveniently than a standalone FTP client can.

This is true whether you created your site using FrontPage or developed it using another editor and later imported it into FrontPage. In particular, FrontPage helps by tracking your entire site and offering several options for uploading. FrontPage 2002 offers the most advanced version of this feature.

To use the FTP-based publishing feature, open your local Web in FrontPage and choose Publish Web from the File menu to begin the process. The Publish Web wizard first requests the location of the remote site. Type the address in the format FTP://internet.address.com/directory/, where internet.address.com is the address of the server, and directory specifies the directory on the server from which your Web is served (or will be).

You must include the full path for the destination, or FrontPage will attempt to put the files into your account's main directory. This is bad for three reasons. First, the main directory might not accept uploads because of restrictions set by your Unix administrator. Second, your site might not work, because Unix administrators typically establish separate directories for Web documents, with the Web server restricted from accessing any other directory.

FrontPage has an option to clear out old files, removing anything from the destination directory that isn't part of the current upload. If you upload to the main directory, you can inadvertently delete files that are essential to your Unix environment.

The Publish Web dialog contains three main buttons: Show, Options, and Publish. When the dialog first opens, it displays only the files and folders belonging to the Web on your local machine; clicking Show opens a second window, which lists the files in your account on the FTP site. The Publish button starts the transfer process.

Before performing the publishing operation, however, click the Options button to get to the Publish tab of the Options dialog. Here you can tell FrontPage to transfer only those files that have changed or to transfer all files and thus overwrite any identically named files in your destination account. You can also instruct FrontPage to determine whether the files have actually changed. The default option is to have the program compare the files on the local and remote Webs, but you can opt for an easier and faster method in which FrontPage simply compares the time stamps of identically named files and overwrites the older version with the newer one.

If you have already mounted your Web on the server and imported it into FrontPage to make changes, using the Publish Web feature for the first time will cause FrontPage to overwrite all destination files. But you can tell it to leave specific files as they are, so that it can make full use of its publishing options next time. Therefore, you should be sure to double-check your local Web to ensure that it's functioning correctly before proceeding. After you've used Publish Web for the first time, subsequent changes to your site will be faster and easier to execute than with standalone FTP clients.

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