Can my Xara site be published through FileZilla?

[Big Frank]

Hi James,

The tech at our company is saying this about our hosting:

"First, I have set up your FileZilla to have FTP Access to the /HTDOCS directory. This is the folder where the site pages are held. ALL of the current Pages are written in PHP which is faster than HTML.

This is simply untrue. PHP requires that both a web server (Apache, IIS, etc) and PHP are running. HTML only requires that a web server is running. However, if your pages actually don't include any PHP code there is no need whatsoever to rename your pages with a PHP extension.

"The last time I spoke with Web Support these were the two supported languages for the server that the site is on. You need to have the first page named Index.php as this is how DNS routes and links to the main page. Then any corresponding pages have to be linked back to this page."

Another mistake. Simply name the home page of your website "index.htm" (or "index.html"), making sure to respect lower case (not capitalised, as he has noted).

I don't have the slightest idea what I'm supposed to do or if Xara can even work like this. I've published a site before the way Xara is set up to publish and it worked fine but with our company's website hosting it's different. I'm lost on what to do. Any help would be great and if there is a way of doing it his way...I need dummy instructions on how to do it. It seems to me that this is an unnecessary way to publish our site.

You're right - it's all unnecessary in a home or SOHO environment, but I.T. departments have internet and firewall policies that they have to respect, so granting you access to FTP via Xara is not something they are in a position to do (I'd be surprised if they even knew how).

All you have to do in Filezilla is navigate in the left-hand pane to the folder where Xara has saved your website (search for the file index.htm and the folder index_htm_files). The I.T. guru has already said that your access on the company web server is restricted to the HTDOCS directory so there's no navigating for you to do in the right-hand pane. Once you're in the folder where your index.htm is stored, select all the files in there that you want to upload, right-click and click "Upload". Filezilla will do the rest.