4. Publish Your Site

What do you do with your design when you’re done creating it in Muse?

That’s a question everyone faces when creating a Web site. Muse gives you two options: upload the site to Adobe Business Catalyst for hosting, or export the necessary files and upload it to your host of choice.

Typically, when you create the design for a Web site and are ready to share it with the world, you need three things:

• Your site (which you just created and tested using Muse)

• A Host (Web hosts are companies that provide space for your site on a server so that users can access your content). Business Catalyst is a host that can also provide you with a URL.

• A URL or domain name (like www.adobe.com)

If you choose to upload to Business Catalyst, you can do so right from within Muse (Figure 4.1). You can even create a trial account, where you have some time to test out the service before committing to it.

Business Catalyst is far more than a hosting provider. Business Catalyst is an online business platform, with email marketing, customer response management, eCommerce, forums, analytics, and more. Over time, Muse will take advantage of more of the power of Business Catalyst, but it will also continue to allow you to create static sites (without blogs, etc.) that can be hosted anywhere.

Figure 4.1 Publish your site using Adobe Business Catalyst.

If you choose to host the site using another vendor, you can simply choose File > Export as HTML (Figure 4.2) and upload the files to the host of your choice using a program like Adobe Dreamweaver or another FTP client.

Using the Export as HTML option, you typically need to acquire the hosting and a URL for yourself through one of the many hosting companies available.

Figure 4.2 Export the HTML to publish your site with another vendor.