As you read in the beginning of Creating and Structuring Your Web Site, you should create your Web site in a development environment that's private and inaccessible to the public. This can be your laptop or desktop PC, or a Web server with no connection to the Internet. Eventually, though, you'll want to unveil your handiwork. To go public, you've got to post a copy of your site up on a live Web server one that's connected to the Internet, where Google and your grandma can find it. This is your live production environment, where the real action takes place. Here, visitors from around the world can see and interact with your pages through their Web browsers. The process of getting your site from development to production is called publishing (see Figure 13-1).
Learning how to publish your site will help you do more than just get your site online. For example, if you want to make a backup of your site, you'd publish it to a disk drive like another folder on your computer, or onto a CD or other storage device (see "Publishing to a disk-based site" on Section 13.2.2). And once your site is up and running, you'll also republish regularly to update your live public site with changes you've made in your development environment (assuming you've made some changes).