How do you add a 'download' to your webpage?

meerustar

Bear with me on this as I'm not that great at explaining things.

My cousin and a few friends have a website aimed at students at the college they used to go to. (They were studying History and stuff so not very techie).

The have a basic site that has information in it and they wanted to add links where people could download something from the site, say for instance an essay or jokes or recipie or something ... (Here is the bit I struggle with) ... They say they want to be able to add a link on the site saying something like 'download jokes here' or something so that you have can save it to your computer but they don't know how it works. They asked me as I have done courses on webpages and HTML but I never touched 'downloading' as such.

They say they have all the jokes etc in a folder and want to link from the site to the file for someone to upload.

Anyone know how to do it? Thanks in advance

(I can gain lots of brownie points from them for this )

woo

You just need to add a normal link to the file and the browser will ask what you want to do.. i.e. save / open

meerustar

Really? It's as easy as that?

So they just have a link to the file on their computer, and when someone click on it it automatically starts? Sounds good to me!

Just one more thing, can the file just be on the computer and no on the webspace? (If you get me). I know they upload their pages using ACEFTP and all the pages are in a folder there ... do the files they want to share need to be in there too? Thanks

albertross_2

the files need to be uploaded to the webserver.

meerustar

Thanks for your speedy responses

horsenailbucket

If you think about it, when you see something like an image on a web page, you have downloaded it to your computer, which you can then normally save. (Even if the save option is disabled you can still take a screen grab.) If you link to a Word document say, you can then save the file.

Cheers

rygon

Yes all you have to do is put up a link. Normally by clicking it, it will ask you what you want to do. But sometimes it will automatically open the link..if you want to save it you can right click on the link and "save as.."

pchelpman

Albertross is spot on.

First, the "jokes" folder itself must be uploaded to the location hosting the whole site THEN the website can have a link to that uploaded folder.

When a site visitor clicks on the link it will take him/her to the uploaded folder NOT to your computer.

SunnySusie

Try pointing them towards a content managment system, my friend is putting a site together for me now for the theatre group I run, its using the e107 system. I think it needs a good host as I had to pay a bit more to be able to run it. My friend is running it at his vaguely :P entertainnig site. My one isnt live yet so I wont post the link but it has a downloads section. There is an admin interface which can be used to upload any files, the system the records number of downloads, allows users to rate, all kinds of cool stuff.

Its all free btw!