MyFitGeek – Tim Goodwin here. I have been avidly reading the comments people have been placing on the BLOG this last week. I am getting some great feedback from it all and it has certainly inspired me to keep writing the BLOG and these emails.

I will try and reply to the comments and questions as best as I can in the coming emails. Whatever you do keep the questions coming.

There was a time when doing web stuff was really, really complicated. I mean, there was no such thing as FrontPage or any of the other WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get). You needed to write code from scratch, there was no templates, or easy to use drag and drop utilities.

Getting your web page up on the net required a IT degree and the ability to write obscure command line stuff… nasty.

Now it is much much easier…

The concept to grasp here is how a website actually appears on the internet. Very simply when you prepare a web page on your computer, no one can see it but you.

Web pages only appear when you place them on a recognised web server. This is like a special computer that is permanently on and can be viewed by anyone at any time.

“Hosting” companies are everywhere, you can pick up a hosting account for as little as a couple of bucks a month. When you do you will be given information of how to access the area where  you place your web pages.

At the risk of being dull and geekie… this is probably the most tedious post this week… This is important information as it will allow you to get back control of your website!!!

Connecting to your area on your server is done through a little  application called an FTP program. Normally you can find FTP applications which will cost you nothing.

Once you have this, and have accessed your server, it is just  like copying files from one part of your hard drive to another, in this case you are copying files from your hard drive to the web server.

That’s it…

As I stated in a previous post, you don’t need to take the  hosting service of your web developer, in fact it is preferable NOT to, so you maintain control over your site.

Many fitness professionals have zero control over their site, which if you have a good developer then this is not an issue, but it can be problematic further down the line.

Whilst I maintain that as fitness professionals we keep our  heads away from this geek stuff, basic concepts like this are fundamental to not being held at gun point by a nerd!