help me understand what I am seeing

[salamidoc]

So I made a website using the wizard here at x10 hosting. Of course, it is a basic template , just for my club. but now I need to modify it and fill it in. So I go to the file manager from my control panel and WHOA! what are all those files? What do they mean and where do I begin. Sure you say, get a book on building web sites. OK, I did, read about dreameaver, etc.

But is there a FAQ on the anatomy of the sample web site generated by the wizard here at X10hosting? Which files do what?


I downloaded dreamweaver as a trial and think I will use it to edit the website-is this a better strategy?

tnx.

salami

 

[masshuu]

Ok, when you open the file manager, you should be in public_html
this is the base of your website, so those file you see there are accessible by the client, ie
you may see a index.html in the folder, this relates to
yourdomain.com/index.html
a folder named Steve will be accessible by
yourdomain.com/Steve/

Basicly when a webbrowser wants to download a page, ie through a link or someone typed it in, lets say i type in yourdomain.com/Bob.html

the web server looks for a file called Bob.html in my public_html, if it finds it, it returns the file. If not then it returns an error message 404

For php pages or other pages that use server side scripting, when they are requested, the server runs the file through a program, then returns the output of the program.

and a quick rundown:

any file ending in html is a plain html file. you can generally edit them in notepad, or in your case, dreamweaver.
any file ending in php is a php file, and is ran through a program that generates html
any file ending in shtml is whats called a Server Side Includes, and im not sure how the server processes these, never worked with them

by default, if the browser doesn't specify a file (yourdomain.com/ or yourdomain.com/Steve/) it looks for a file called index.html or index.php

im not sure what files you are seeing, but thats a rundown of what files are.

You may come across files called .htaccess, these are a little more advance, and i generally would not touch them unless they cause problems

i assume you know what image files are