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Many of my business clients need to make minor changes to their website but are reluctant to incur additional I.T. costs to do so. FTP programs offer an inexpensive alternative and are easy to learn.

Please see below 15 step-by-step instructions for making minor changes to your website without calling your I.T. person.

1. Go to www.ipswitch.com, and click on “downloads” on the top menu bar.

2. Select WS_FTP Home, and click on “try” for the free 30-day version. You can choose whether to purchase it later.

3. Download and open the program.

4. You should see two windows. The one on the left says “My computer,” and the one on the right will show the online files for your website, after you enter your ftp address, user ID and password.

5. If you don’t already know them, find out your ftp address, user ID and password for your website by contacting your host or IT person. Then, enter them into the menu bar just above the two windows.

6. After you’ve done this, click “Go” on the top menu bar, adjacent to the box where you entered your password, and you should see the html files for your website in the right window. 

7. To change the text on any web page, highlight the web page in the right window by clicking on its html file, and then click the green arrow in between the two windows pointing from right to left.

This will transfer a copy of the file you selected from the online window on the right to the “My computer” window on the left.

8. To change the web page, right-click on its html file, now in your left window, and open it as a text file (select “open with” from the pull-down menu and then select “Notepad.”)  

9. Make any changes you wish to the words of your web page that you’ll see in the text file you just opened but leave the html programming alone. (You may eventually learn some basic bracketing instructions for html, but that’s another lesson.)

10. Save the changed text document as a new html file by clicking “file, save as,” and adding the extension “.html” to the end of the file name. (To change the format of the document from text to html, you’ll also need to change the “type” field in the bottom of the “save as” box from “text files” to “all files.”)

11. Refresh the Ipswitch program to see the updated file. You can do this by clicking on the icon with circular blue arrows above the window.

12. Review the new web page to check your changes by double-clicking on its html file in the left window.

13. Delete the old html file in your online (right) window. (There is a delete button above each window. Just select the file, and click delete.)

14. Transfer the new html file online by selecting it in the “My Computer” window, and clicking on the green arrow in between the two windows, pointing from left to right. Make sure your new html file has the same name as the old one you deleted.

15. Visit your website using Internet Explorer to confirm the change has been made.