Service Set-upWeb Builder Tips
top Register or transfer hosting of a domain There are two ways to register your domain. You can either have Covad manage the entire registration process, including registering the domain through Network Solutions, or you can register the domain yourself through any registrar. If you use your own registrar, you must request that they set the nameservers to point to ns1.covad.net and ns2.covad.net. If you have an existing domain name, you can transfer the hosting of the domain (DNS, Web hosting and email) to Covad by logging into My Covad Account and following the steps in the Domain Transfer link on the left. You can then use My Covad Account to launch Website OS to add and delete DNS records, manage you domain email, and edit your Web site. Note: You are responsible for making the changes to your domain name record through your registrar after you have pointed an existing domain name to Covad's nameservers. Covad DNS servers will be authoritative for you domain name, but only after you make changes to the domain name record through the registrar and point the domain name record's DNS server settings to ns1.covad.net and ns2.covad.net. Pointing the name servers should only be done after you have completed setting up DNS records, email accounts and publishing of your web content. Select the Register New Domain or Transfer Existing Domain links in My Covad Account to begin this process. top Select a Hosting Plan After submitting your request to Register/Transfer your domain, you should then select a hosting plan in the Your Hosting Services page. (Note: If you purchased your hosting plan at the same time you purchased Covad access, you can ignore this section.) Covad offers three Web Hosting Plans. Select one of these plans if you would like Covad to host your Web site. If you wish to host your own site but want Covad to manage your DNS, please see the section on How to Configure your DNS.
top Choose a Web design Option Once you have selected your Web hosting plan, you will need to decide how you want to design your Web site. You have the following options: 1) Use your own software, such as Microsoft FrontPage or Dreamweaver, to build your site and then upload that content to Covad servers. 
In both of these cases, all Covad hosting plans support the necessary tools, including FTP and Microsoft FrontPage extensions, to upload your Web site content to Covad servers. We will show you how to do this later in this document. 3) In addition to the two mentioned above, Covad offers yet a third option. Covad's EasySite Wizard is an easy-to-use software tool that allows those with little or no Web design experience to build a professional-looking Web site in just minutes. You can choose form over 50 different Web templates, each with unique images, pages and styles. There is no software to download and it is easily accessible through My Covad Account.If you use Covad's EasySite Wizard to create your site, be sure and pick a template that relates to your specific business. There are over 50 different templates to choose from, split between product and service businesses. If you don't find one that fits your business perfectly, generic templates like "Any Service Business" and "Any Product Business" are also viable options.  top Manage your website You can now begin building and/or maintaining your site. You can manage all aspects of your hosting services by launching Website OS using any of the links, located in the Covad Hosting Services section of My Covad Account. Please ensure you have pop-up blockers turned off before clicking on the links. Website OS will launch in a separate window.  If you chose Covad's EasySite Wizard to build your website, launch the EasySite Wizard by clicking on the Site Builder link found in Website OS in the top left hand corner. Another box will appear showing the EasySite Wizard icon. Click on this and the application will launch in the center of the window. Follow the wizard steps to build your site, including design, layout, creation of pages and content. If additional help is needed click on the  icon found in the top right of the tool.
 top FTP Settings By default FTP transfer is enabled to the Covad Web Server. You will need to download an FTP application to use. Multiple free or shareware FTP applications can be found on the internet on sites like download.com. In the Host field on your FTP application type in your domain name. If you have not pointed your DNS to Covad yet you can also put in the IP for our web servers in the host field: 69.49.109.29. The user name is your domain name and the password is the same as the password for My Covad Account. All content that is moved to the server via FTP transfer should be placed in the Public folder. Secondary FTP user access for additional users be granted using the FTP Manager Tool found under the Security icon in Website OS. This tool allows you to create secondary FTP users and passwords and limit the users to specific folders.  top FrontPage Extensions If you are using Microsoft FrontPage to create and develop your website, you must enable the FrontPage Server Extensions on your site. This next section will allow you to enable or disable the extensions and change your FrontPage password.  Covad currently supports the server extensions for FrontPage 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2003. FrontPage server extensions give you full support of remote authoring, threaded discussion groups, full text search, surveys, and so much more. Note: enabling FrontPage using the FrontPage manager tool disables FTP access. If you should need both FrontPage and FTP access simultaneously, please contact Covad Support at 1-888-642-6823 option 6 to request both be enabled. top Domain Pointing The Domain Pointing Tool in Website OS is available if you have a Parked Domain or an Email Only Package. It allows you to point your domain to another domain that already has a website built or even a specific page within that website. Simply put the URL for the website you wish to point to in the first field. If you check the box for Show pointed URL in Address/Location Bar, anyone that puts your domain name in their browser will only see your domain name in their browser URL field even after they are redirected to the website you are pointing your domain to. If you leave the box unchecked, the browser will display the website's actual URL that you are pointing to. Two A records pointing a WWW record and an A record for your domain are created by default in DNS Manager pointing to 69.49.109.30. These records must remain present to utilize the Domain Pointing Feature.  top |