Step 1 Downloading your website to your computer.
Before you can edit your website you should have a full copy of your website on your computer.
You will first need to create a folder on your computer to store your copy of the website. This is usually at My Documents\My Webs\yourwebsitename.com. To create a folder in My Documents right click on My Documents and then left click on Explore, in the left column click on the folder in which you wish to create the new folder, then click on the file menu - New - folder and rename "New Folder" as appropriate (yourwebsitename.com).
If you are using Expression Web or SharePoint Designer you can publish your website directly from the web server to your computer. If you are not using one of these programs you will need to download your website from our server to your computer with a separate File Transfer Program (FTP). If you need to use a separate FTP program please go BACK to our previous version of this page for detailed instructions.
Open Expression Web or SharePoint Designer and then on the File menu click on Open Site. When the dialogue window first opens it will probably have My Webs or My Websites or something similar in the "Look in:" (or "Site name")  box. If you can see yourwebsitename.com in the larger white box (below the Look in box) double (left) click on yourwebsitename.com and it should then appear in the "Look in:" box. If you cannot see the folder yourwebsitename.com you will need to browse to find the folder. When you have yourwebsitename.com in the "Look in:" box click on the "Open" button.
You may be asked about adding information to web - you should click on "Yes".
You should now click on "Remote Web Site" at the bottom left of the screen and then on "Remote Web Site Properties" (top right - just above white area).
In the Remote Web Site Properties dialogue box ensure that the Remote web server type is set to FTP (NOT FrontPage or SharePoint server extensions) and enter the FTP host address in the "Remote Web site location" box (ftp://178.239.164.147 or similar) and ../../../web in the Directory box then click on "OK". You will then be asked for your username and password, after entering these and clicking on OK you will be connected to the web server.
The web server files will appear in the right hand window. Below the right hand window are some publishing options and for the first publication only change the "Publish all web pages" option to "Remote to local" then click on "Publish Web site". After a short delay the website files will be transferred to your computer and will appear in the left hand window. Once you have successfully published the website to your computer you should click on "Folders" at the bottom left of the screen.
You should now be ready to edit the website copy on your computer.

Step 2 Excluding files from publishing.
You must stop your program automatically publishing certain files on your website. This is covered in detail in it's own section of this website please click HERE to go to this section.

Steps 1 & 2 only need to be done once - all subsequent editing can be done starting with Step 3

Step 3 Preparing and saving your image files in the images directory of your website.
THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT FOR THE CORRECT FUNCTIONING OF YOUR WEBSITE - UNLESS YOU HAVE A BETTER METHOD OF PRODUCING SMALL FILE SIZES FOR YOUR IMAGES PLEASE FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS BELOW EXACTLY - DO NOT USE IMAGES DIRECTLY FROM YOUR CAMERA OR SCANNER.
Images used on a website are usually .gif or .jpg format. Gif images are used for man made images, such as logos etc, where there is a limited number of colours present. Amongst other features, .gif images can have an irregular shaped mask and can be moving images. Jpegs (.jpg) are generally used for photographs as they have a much wider colour range.
Photographs are usually scanned or downloaded (from a digital camera) and always require preparation for use on a website. This preparation must be done in a photo editing program and not in FrontPage.
The formula I use for photographic image preparation is as follows:-
1. ensure the photo is cropped to what you want to show.
2. resample the image to the size you require - I generally use a maximum of 380 pixels in any direction (horizontally or vertically)- the DPI doesn't really matter but for uniformity I always set it to 100dpi.
3. carry out any adjustment to tone / colour etc as necessary.
4. save the image as a .jpg in the images directory of your website - I generally use a compression of 50 and if smoothing is available to you I would suggest you set this to 10. Using these settings you should be able to achieve a file size of less than 20kb. Please do NOT use uppercase letters or spaces in the file name.
5. when putting the image in your page do NOT adjust the size as this will produce a poor image, adjustment for size should be carried out as in item 3 above.
IF YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND ANY OF STEP 3 PLEASE CONTACT OUR HELPDESK

Step 4 Opening your website in ExpressionWeb or Sharepoint.
You should almost always open your web in FrontPage, rather than opening individual files. Individual files are edited, within the progran, with the web open. You can either click on the file menu and then on Open Web, or click on the Open Web icon to open your website in your program. Please be sure that you open yourwebsitename.com and not My Webs.

Step 5 Editing your website in FrontPage.
NOTE Free on-line courses on the use of ExpressionWeb are available at http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc136535.aspx. If you are using SharePoint, then we suggest that you look at the above for basic information. The on-line course available from Microsoft for SharePoint deal mainly with the collaborative features of SharePoint which are not necessary for most of our websites.
Please do not edit or delete the file oldindex.html - this is your instructions and link to the control panel of your virtual server. Also, with our older frames websites, if you have a file named indexm.htm in your website, unless you are sure you know what you are doing, do not edit the file index.htm (or index.html) in the root directory of your website. The homepage of older websites is indexm.htm, the other pages should have self explanatory names. Websites produced since late 2007 use templates rather than frames and do not have the file indexm.htm. In these cases index.html (or index.htm) is the homepage. You would need to use FrontPage 2003 or later to have the full features of editing a template website. With a template website the top and bottom of each page must be edited in templates/basic.dwt - changes here change every page.
Once you have familiarised yourself with FrontPage by using the tutorials you should be ready to edit your website. Please look at how things are already done and laid out to give you guidelines to how you should proceed. Some general tips are:
Always use tables to put text in columns or alongside images.
Do NOT use multiple spaces to format text - there are other formatting tools available.
Always remember that other people are likely to be viewing your website on a screen that is set differently to yours (larger or smaller).

Step 6 Checking your website before publishing.
When you have finished editing your website it is a good idea to preview your website in the browser (Internet Explorer) before you publish as you can pick up most errors this way before someone else sees them.
With your web open, close all other files (after saving them) and open index.htm, then click on the "Preview in Browser" icon (to the right of the print icon). This will open the website on your computer and it will look almost exactly like it will when published. Some things, such as the hit counter and the guestbook script will not work (they only work on the server).
Fully check out your website before you publish your website. If you find errors, correct them in FrontPage and keep checking your website until you are sure it is error free.

Step 7 Publishing your website.
If you are not using ExpressionWeb or Sharepoint you must use your FTP program to copy your changed files back to your website. Publishing directly from ExpressionWeb (versions 1 or 2) or Sharepoint is generally very easy. (You must be on-line - connected to the Internet). With your web open, go to the Web Site folder and click on Remote Web site (at the bottom of the screen). You will next be asked for your username and password - if you have previously connected the username should be already displayed but the password will probably have to be entered manually.
The first time you publish it will re-publish your whole website, but on subsequent publishing, unless someone publishes your website from a different computer, only the changed items will be published.
When it has completed publishing it will bring up a message box stating that it has successfully published your website. It is always a good idea to view your website immediately after publishing as a final check that all is as you intended. You sometimes have to click on refresh (sometimes repeatedly) in your browser to view the updated pages.
If you have problems publishing it is usually a slow or bad connection to the Internet issue. In this circumstance it is quite a good idea to close down the program completely, wait a minute or two, maybe re-connect to the Internet, re-open your web in your editing program and re-publish.

Step 8 Congratulate yourself.
Hopefully by the time you have got to this stage your website has been successfully published exactly as you wanted.
If this is not the case please go back and review this procedure. If this does not help then please ask us for help - email: helpdesk@eqwebs.com - Telephone (+44) 0845 166 5561.