Publishing Your Website from the Remote Server with FrontPage Server Extensions

IMPORTANT NOTE: There are very few hosting companies that still offer FrontPage Server Extensions.

Publishing Your Website from the Remote Server with Expression Web

Are you working on your website live? Do you have a backup of your website?

If your answered YES to the first question and NO to the second, you could be in for a nasty surprise one day. Accidents do happen to even the most experienced of computer users. Could you reconstruct all of your hard work if something happened on the server and you had no backup?

If you have FrontPage Server Extensions installed on your host server, you can reverse publish the remote site to your hard drive using FrontPage or Expression Web. First, create an empty website on your hard drive.

Create an Empty Website

Start Expression Web > Site > New Site  > General > Empty Website

Under specify location of the new web,  place your cursor in box and delete from the right end up to the slash after My Web Sites \
Type in the name of your web - use a hyphen rather than a underscore to separate words. I use the actual name of my website as the folder name (expression-web-tutorials).
Click OK
The new web will be created. Use this for the folder to backup your remote site.

 
Fig 1: Create New Site

Publish Your Remote Site

Open your remote site in Expression Web. Site > Open Site > Type in the URL of your site. Enter User Name and Password if asked.

Your remote site files will show in the left hand window and will be labeled local site. The right hand side will be blank.

Click the Publishing Tab > Click Add a Publishing Destination OR click Publishing Settings

Fig 5: Publishing Settings

In the Site Settings dialog box > Click Add
In the Connection Settings Dialog Box Type a name for the site > For Connection Setting choose File System from the drop down menu > Browse to the location of your newly created site >Click Add.

Fig 6: Connection Settings

Your remote website files will show on the left hand side of the window, the right hand side will be empty BUT the new local web will show at the top of the screen.

Fig 7: Publishing Panel

One the Site menu > select Publish All Files and the process will start. All files that are listed including the ones that are used by the host server will be published. Once the process has finished, you will have a copy of your website on your hard drive.

Summary

Now that you have a copy of your website on your hard drive, you can edit locally and then publish to the server. If there is a fatal crash of the server or something happens, you can easily republish your site. And if you happen to make a mistake in editing, the entire world will not see you mistake.

Copyright © 2011 by Expression Web Tutorials

Updated August 2011