This tutorial will teach you how to upload files to a web site (web server) using FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

You can use FTP through the command prompt in Windows, but this is very inefficient and confusing at times. Instead, there are GUI (Graphical User Interface) programs which make uploading files much easier. These programs access the command prompt in the background for you, but all you see is a nice graphical program telling you that it's uploading your files.

In this tutorial, I'll be using WS_FTP (download here: WS_FTP). It doesn't matter if you use this program or a different one, they're all pretty similar and do the same things. Some might have features in them that others don't, but these are for convenience and not necessary. I use WS_FTP because I really like programs with minimal aesthetics, that just get the job done, and don't take up all of my RAM.

Open up your FTP client, and you'll see something similar to this:


On any FTP client, you'll see something that asks for the address, user id, and password. These are the only things we're going to worry about for this tutorial. As you can see, my address (referred to as different things depending on your client) is ftp.tr1x.com. This doesn't necessarily mean that blahblah.com's FTP address is ftp.blahblah.com. Depending on who is in charge of the web server, they could have named it differently.

At any rate, enter the FTP address, your user id, and your password. Now, after you log in, most FTP clients will show the web server files listed to the right, and your computer's files listed to the left. You can now make directories and upload files to the web server. You can either drag and drop files to the right side, which will upload them, or you can navigate to a file on the left (your computer's files) and then click the button (varies on different clients) which will send the file from your computer to the web server. In WS_FTP, this button is a right arrow.

This should give you a basic knowledge of how to log in to a web server, everything else is pretty easy to figure out.

Having trouble? Contact me via email: admin@tr1x.com