Online Help

This article will show you how you can make your own web page within your iiNet Group members webspace. Legacy broadband accounts within the iiNet Group come with 1GB of free web space which you can use to make a website. Learn more.

It's important to note that this article specifically relates to customers utilizing their free members webspace and not for customers with iiNet Hosting services. If you have an iiNet Hosting service, please see the Hosting Control Panel FAQ.

Please note: Expressing yourself is fun, but make sure your website doesn't contain any prohibited content.

Select one of the links below to jump to a query:

• Your FTP and web address
•   Your FTP credentials
• Learning the language
• Uploading your home page
• Adding content to your home page
• Videos
• Images

Your FTP and web address

First, you'll need to know where to go to get started. The FTP address is where you can view and upload the HTML files for your web pages. Once they're uploaded, the web address is where you'll go to see your creation. These addresses vary according to your ISP within the iiNet Group, as listed below.

Please note: In the addresses below, you'll need to replace "USERNAME" with your own username (e.g. "john.citizen").

 
Your FTP credentials

Within your FTP program of choice, you'll be prompted for your login details to any of the above servers.

Your login details will always match the credentials you use to login to your iiNet Toolbox or Westnet MyAccount, you can recover them by clicking the Forgotten your password? link on the login page.

Learning the language

Have you heard about HTML? It's one of the major languages of the web. You can use it to do everything from making text bold or colourful, to specifying where images or paragraph breaks should go on your web page.

Once you've got th ehang of HTML, you can also save some time by using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This allows to to specify that every paragraph should be a certain font, and ever header should be a certain colour etc. without having to HTML code everything individually.

These websites can show you the basics of HTML and CSS. Once you know what HTML tags you want to use, you can write your web pages in your computer's free word processing software (e.g. Notepad for Windows or TextEdit for Mac OSX) and then save it as a .html file.

• Bare Bones Guide to HTML
• HTML Goodies
• CSS Introduction
  
• CSS Beginner Tutorial
• Word to Clean HTML Converter
• HTML Colour Picker

Uploading your home page

Your home page is a HTML file that must be named "index.html". It's the very first page you'll see when you go to your web address. These instructions will cover making your home page and uploading to the FTP through your browser.
 

1. Open the text editing software on your computer. Windows users should have Notepad installed by default, and Mac OSX users should have a utility called TextEdit.

   If you're looking for a more user-friendly way to make your HTML files, you may want to consider downloading Sublime Text. Some users may have advanced web creation software (e.g. Adobe Dreamweaver), but we're just covering the basics here.
    

2. Type something! You can have your first crack at properly formatting your home page in HTML, or just type a word or two to test it out.

   Note: You'll be tweaking this file a lot. If you're working with Notepad or TextEdit, even though the final product will be a .html file, you should save a version as a .txt file for easy editing in the future.
    
   
    

3. Once you're ready for your first shot at uploading your web page, select Save As in your text editing software and save your file as "index.html".
    
   
    
4. Open your file explorer (e.g. My Computer). In the location bar at the top of the window, enter your FTP address and then hit the Enter key on your keyboard.
    
   
    
5. This show your FTP files on the internet within the file explorer. You'll need to log in with your broadband account username and password before you can see it. Copy and paste your index.html file here.
    
6. Once your index.html file is saved in your FTP server, you'll see your text when you visit your web address!
    
   
    
7. Whenever you want to update your home page, just replace the index.html file with the latest version by saving it on your FTP server. If you don't see the changes on your home page after a few minutes, try clearing your browser cache.
    
8. Alternatively, you may wish to download a FTP Client such as WinSCP or FileZilla to transfer files from your computer to your FTP server.

Adding content to your home page

Adding images or videos to your website is fairly easy; you just need to know where the content is coming from, and what HTML tags to use.

Videos

1. Videos from websites like YouTube are easy to add; just choose Embed from the Share options, and then copy the line of HTML it makes for you.
    
   
    
2. Paste this HTML into your index.txt file and then save it as an index.html file.
    
   
    
3. Save this updated index.html file to your FTP file. The next time you visit your web address, you'll see the video from YouTube embedded on your web page.
    
   
    

Images

1. First, you'll need to save your images to your FTP server. Advanced users should note that there's no need to utilise the "public_html" file - just save them to the same location as your index.html file.
    
2. Once you get into uploading multiple files to your FTP, you'll probably want to get yourself a FTP Client rather than accessing your web server through your file explorer. An FTP Client is a piece of software that makes managing the files on your computer and your FTP server much more user-firendly.

   There's plenty of free FTP clients out there, such as WinSCP and FileZilla.
    

3. Once your image is uploaded, you'll need to figure out its image location URL. This is your web address followed by the complete file name of the image file (including the file extension, e.g. "example.png").

   Please note: It's important to use your public web address when doing this - if you use the FTP address (typically found next to Location in File Properties) visitors to your website won't see your image unless they provide your username and password, which is not information that you want other people to have.

   http://members.iinet.net.au/~USERNAME/FILE_NAME.XTN

   
    

4. In your index.txt file, enter the following HTML tag, replacing "image_URL" with the image location URL for the picture you want to use.

   <img src="image_URL">

   
    

5. Save your index.html file and upload the new version to your FTP server. Now you should see your image when you visit your web address!