Set Up Your First Website

Now that you have a customer account and a domain name, the first thing you will want to do is create a website. The information about the possible ways to do it is provided in the section 1. Create Your Site

When your site is ready, you may want to take a look at the result in your browser. Learn how to do it in the section 2. Preview your Site.

Even a perfectly designed site will not be effective if no one knows about it. When all the design work is done, you need to submit your site to popular search engines. The corresponding instruction is located in the section 3. Submit Your Sites to Search Engines.

1. Create Your Site

There are three general ways to create a website:

• Employ a web design studio to create a site for you, and then you will just maintain its content.
• Create a site by yourself using Presence Builder - a powerful tool that enables you to create professional-looking websites in a few mouse clicks. Learn more in the section Presence Builder.
• Create your website in a third-party Content Management System - an editor that allows you to easily create and edit website content such as pages, scripts, applications, and so on. To learn more about creating sites in third-party content management systems, see the section Content Management Systems.

If you have purchased a ready-made site or created it by yourself, you should upload the site content to your account to make the site visible on the web. There are two ways to upload content:

• Using FTP. Learn more in the section Uploading Content Using FTP.
• Using an integrated File Manager. Learn more in the section Uploading Content with File Manager.
  
  

Presence Builder

Presence Builder is a great tool that enables users with no knowledge of HTML markup or graphic design skills to create professional-looking sites. This tool provides a simple visual editor and a huge set of templates for different websites. Just pick a suitable page design and content template, add your text to the pages, and publish the site. The editor allows you to create web pages, add content of different types (text, images, video, scripts), and edit website settings such as website name, keywords, icons, and so on.

You can create and publish websites using Presence Builder if your hosting subscription provides this option. If it does not, or if you have already created and published the allowed number of sites, you still can create a website with Presence Builder and edit it. However, to publish this website, you will need to upgrade your hosting plan.

To create websites in Presence Builder, ensure that your hosting subscription includes this option. If it does not, choose another way or upgrade your subscription.

To create a website with Presence Builder:

1. Go to Websites & Domains and find your domain name.
2. Click the Create Site button under Presence Builder.
3. Select a topic that best suits your website.
4. Edit the website:
   1. Structure: add more pages, remove the predefined pages that you do not need.
   2. Content: change the predefined content to your own, add text, images, videos, scripts, and other required elements.
   3. Design: change the layout and color scheme.
5. Publish the website.

Content Management Systems

Content Management Systems (or CMS) are third-party applications that provide a graphical user interface for adding and editing website content: pages, scripts, files, multimedia content, and so on. The following CMS are the most popular and widely used:

• WordPress - a free and open-source blogging tool.
• Joomla - a free and open-source content management system for publishing web content.
• Drupal - a free and open-source content-management framework

Before you can create a website with a CMS, you need to install the CMS on your hosting account. There are two options available:

• Install a CMS as a web application. All most popular CMS can be installed as web applications using the Plesk interface. To do so, follow these instructions:

1. Go to Applications.
2. Find the CMS you need in the list of available applications, and install it as described in the Web Applications section.
3. Create your website in the CMS. For information about creating websites with your CMS, refer to the relevant documentation.

• If the desired CMS cannot be found on the list of available web applications, you need to download and install it according to the installation instructions provided in the documentation of the CMS of your choice.

Note: You can install a CMS as a web application only if your hosting subscription allows it.

Uploading Content

If you already have a website created by yourself or a web design studio, just upload the website files and folders to your provider's server. By default, you need to upload the website content to the httpdocs directory. In Plesk for Windows you can also upload content to a virtual directory. It is convenient, for example, if you want to have multiple ASP.NET applications using different versions of ASP.NET on your website. 

You can upload content in one of the following ways:

• Using FTP. This way is better when several people manage a website's content because it does not require access to your customer account. You can just create FTP users for them. Learn more about this method in the section Uploading Content Using FTP.
• Using File Manager in Customer Panel. This way is more convenient since it uses the Customer Panel GUI and provides a set of useful features, for example, a visual HTML editor and a file permissions manager. Find more information on the features of File Manager in the section Uploading Content with File Manager.

Uploading Content Using FTP

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, a method of transferring files over the Internet. To upload files via FTP, you will need a special program called an FTP client. FileZilla is a free and reliable FTP client. You can download it here:

https://filezilla-project.org/download.php?type=client

Its documentation can be found here:

https://wiki.filezilla-project.org/Documentation

Of course, you are free to use a different FTP client if you choose. To connect to an FTP server, you need the following information:

• FTP server address. The FTP address should be ftp://your-domain-name.com, where your-domain-name.com is your site’s Internet address.
• FTP username. It is identical to your system username. Note that the system username may differ from the username that you use for logging in to Plesk. To find what your system user name is, go to Websites & Domains and click Web Hosting Access. You will find it under Username. You can change your system username if you want.
• FTP password. It is identical to your system user password. If you do not know what your system user password is, go toWebsites & Domains and click Web Hosting Access. You can reset the password under Password.

To publish a website using FTP:

1. Connect to your webspace on the server with an FTP client program, using your FTP account username and password.

   Enable the passive mode if you are behind a firewall. Refer to your FTP client documentation to learn how to enter passive mode.

2. Upload the files and directories of your site to the httpdocs directory. If you use CGI scripts, place them in the cgi-bindirectory.
3. Close your FTP session.

You can also set up additional FTP accounts if you need to collaborate on website content with other users. For more information, see the section Adding FTP Accounts.

Uploading Content with File Manager

To upload a website from your computer to the Plesk server by using File Manager, follow these steps:

1. On your computer, add the folder containing your website’s files to an archive (right-click the folder and select Send To >Compressed (zipped) Folder) from the context menu.
2. In the Customer Panel, go to Files, click the httpdocs folder to open it, click Upload Files, select the archive file, and clickOpen.
3. Once the file has been uploaded, click the checkbox next to it and select the Extract Files option.

If you want to edit pages of your website, you can do it in File Manager. It provides an HTML editor that allows visual editing of HTML pages (without needing to manually type HTML tags). To edit a file in the HTML editor, place the mouse pointer over the file, click  to open the file's context menu, and select Edit in HTML Editor.

You can also edit files in the File Manager's text editor. To open a file in the text editor, click  to open the file's context menu, and select Edit in Text Editor.

If you have files or web pages that you want to make inaccessible on the Internet, change these files' access permissions in File Manager. To edit access permissions for a file or a directory, click  to open the context menu, and select Change Permissions. To learn how to review and edit the permissions, refer to the section Setting File and Directory Access Permissions.

2. Preview Your Site

After you uploaded website files to the webspace, you can check how your site will look in a web browser, even before the information about the new site has spread in the Domain Name System.

To preview a site:

1. Go to Websites & Domains.
2. Click Preview below the domain name of the website that you want to preview.

   You site will open in a new browser window.

Note: The contents of password-protected directories might be inaccessible in the Preview mode.

Sometimes, you may need to show your site to someone when your domain name is not registered yet. There are several ways to do it without giving a person access to your customer account.

3. Submit Your Sites to Search Engines

To gain more visitors and drive traffic to your site after you publish it on the Internet, you need to submit it to search engines. Before the site submission, you can improve the site ranking in search results by the following content optimizations:

• Include in the text contained in your web pages the frequently searched keyword phrases, which are relevant to the topic of your site. For example, mention your product or a topic of your interest several times in the text on a web page.
• Add relevant keywords to the <title> and <meta> tags. Some search engines look for keywords and descriptions in meta tags placed within web pages, and present these keywords in search results.

For example, if you are selling hosting automation software, then you can include the following tags in HTML pages of your website:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Ordering hosting automation software
</TITLE>
<META name="keywords" content="order,hosting,software">
<META name="description" content="Ordering Hosting Automation Software">
</HEAD>

Separate the keywords with a comma without white spaces.

After you optimize the website and publish it to your customer account, submit it to search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other engines that you know to be popular in your country.

• To submit a site to Google, follow the instructions at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1352276.
• To submit a site to Yahoo, visit http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html.
• To submit a site to Bing, visit http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url.