Publishing and Using Your Own Domain

Publishing is a decision

Up to now the site has been yours alone. Publishing is the moment it becomes reachable by anyone with the address.

You ask for it in the same box as everything else. Ask ChatGPT to publish the site and it handles the hosting part for you, because the site sits on OpenAI's own infrastructure. There is no separate hosting company to sign up with and no files to upload anywhere.

What you get back is a web address you can send to someone. That is the entire mechanism, and it is genuinely the easiest part of this course.

Publish this site and give me the address. Then tell me, in
plain English, who can see it and what happens to that address
if I make more changes afterwards.

The second half of that prompt is the useful half. Ask what publishing means for your specific site rather than assuming, because this is a beta and the answer may not be what it was last month.

What sharing a static page means

A published static page has no gate on it. Anyone with the link can open it, and links travel. Someone forwards an email, someone pastes it into a group chat, and it is out.

So the rule is simple and worth taking seriously: do not put anything on a published site that you would mind a stranger reading. No client lists, no unannounced pricing, no internal notes, nothing you were told in confidence. A static page cannot check who is asking, because checking who is asking is precisely the thing static sites cannot do.

Your own domain

You can use a domain you already own. Two conditions come with that.

You have to already own it. Sites builds and hosts. Buying a domain is a separate purchase from a domain registrar, and that stays your job.

You have to be able to edit its settings. That means having the login for wherever you bought it. If your domain was registered years ago by a web designer you no longer work with, sort that out first, because nothing else can happen until you can get into it.

How the connecting bit works, conceptually

Here is the shape of it, without any specifics, and the reason for that follows.

A domain name is a lookup entry. When somebody types your address, their browser asks the address book of the internet where that name points, and goes there. Connecting your domain to your site means editing that entry, at your registrar, so it points at the place where Sites is hosting your site.

That is the whole idea. In practice it means signing in to your registrar, finding the DNS settings for that domain, and entering the values you were given.

Notice what is missing. I have not told you which values to enter, and that is deliberate. It is also the most useful thing in this lesson. Those values come from Sites at the moment you connect the domain, they are specific to your site, and on a product this new they can change. Any tutorial that printed them, this one included, would be wrong sooner rather than later. Get them from the source and use those.

Then wait. DNS changes are not instant, and it can take a while for the new address to work everywhere. If it works for you but not for a colleague, that is usually propagation rather than a mistake.

I want to connect a domain I already own to this site.
Before I start, list everything I need to have ready and
everything I need to be able to do. Do not give me generic
DNS instructions. Tell me what you need from me, and what
you will give me that I then have to enter at my registrar.

I have made the change at my registrar. Explain what should
happen now, roughly how long it typically takes, and what
I should check if the address still does not work tomorrow.

One last thing before you send the link

Read the published page as a stranger would, on a phone. Not to admire it, but to check that the thing you wanted the visitor to do is obvious within a few seconds. That is the only test the site really has to pass.