After my previous post, showing how to use Whiist to quickly create photo albums on a Windows Home Server, a number of people asked for an article showing similar steps for creating regular websites that either they or family members can use.

This post will show you those steps and explain a little more about some of the options in Whiist, the files that compose your website, and how IIS (the webserver in Windows Home Server) deals with documents.

In this example I’m going to create a new website for my girlfriend. As part of her PhD program she teaches classes at UCLA and often has supporting materials to hand out to her class.

Having a website on our Windows Home Server will be an easy way she can make these materials accessible to students who missed class or need another copy. Not only does she simply have to copy the files onto the server from her laptop, but she can use one of the many programs that support HTML to edit the main page without having to worry about FTP.

So, here are the steps I took to create this new website

Creating your new site

1) Assuming you haven’t done so, download and install the latest version of the Whiist Website Management Add-In for your Windows Home Server

2) Open your Windows Home Server console and in the “Website Management” tab choose “Add”

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3) In the Wizard choose “Create a new site..” and hit Next.

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4) Enter a new alias for your website. This will be used as part of the address for your album so can only contain letters and numbers.

Use “Browse” to select an existing folder or to create a new one. Because this site is for my girlfriend I’ve created it in her user folder.

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5) It’s now time to choose some options for the website.

  • Although my girlfriend will be adding her own content I’ve left the options to create a default page and favicon for the purposes of this example.
  • This website will only be for her students, so there’s no point in having a link to it on our Windows Home Server homepage.
  • Although there probably isn’t any harm in in, I’ve chosen to stop search engines from indexing the content.
  • The site will not be using any ASP (Active Server Pages – a method of programming dynamic websites for IIS).

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After selecting these options choose “Next and complete the Wizard”.

Working with your site

At this point your website is ready for use and it’s time to replace the default content with your own. Assuming you chose the same options I did, the folder where you created your website should contain files similar to the screenshot below.

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  • favicon.ico – This is the icon shown in the address bar of a browser when people visit your site. Most graphics programs don’t support the.icon format, but sites such as www.favicongenerator.com will convert normal mage formats to a .ico
  • robots.txt – This is the file that tells search engines such as Google and Yahoo to ignore your site. If you’d like to customize this file (for example to allow websearches, but not image searches) then www.robotstxt.org is a good place to start.
  • index.htm – This is the index file, or main document, for your website. You must have a file called index.htm or default.htm for people to be able to view your website. (If you have enabled ASP then you may also use default.asp or default.aspx). Without an index file you will see an error when attempting to view your website.

As I mentioned before, because your website is on your Windows Home Server it’s easy to change or add files without having to use FTP. Any program that supports HTML can be used to create new content simply by saving to the correct location!

For example; Here’s the default page that Whiist creates open for editing in Microsoft Word 2003.

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A note about folders

After choosing a folder for your website in Whiist the contents of this folder become accessible to the world. To avoid accidentally copying private files here I suggest creating all websites either in a separate share or a folder named websites/www etc.

You can also create new folders within your website. For example, my girlfriend could create folders for week1, week2 etc which would then be accessible via www.ourserver.com/teaching/week1, www.ourserver.com/teaching/week2 and so on.

As with the main site each folder must have a file named either index.htm or default.htm to be viewable in a web browser.

In summary

Although hosting blogs and entire websites is probably beyond the desire (and bandwidth!) of most Windows Home Server users, the ability to host your own content can be incredibly useful.

It’s worth checking out some of the programs that can quickly generate great looking webpages and photo albums. Windows Home Server and Whiist make it easy to take this content and make it available to family and friends in minutes.

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