Empty Your Cache
Sometimes you will make changes to a page, FTP it to your site, and then when you open that page on the web, your changes aren’t there. The page looks just as it did before you did all that work! Or maybe a friend tells you about a new addition to one of your favorite sites, but you go there and can’t see the new thing they are talking about.
Don’t worry, in most instances, clicking on your browser’s “Refresh” or “Reload” button will fix it. If you try this a few times and the new page still doesn’t come up, you may have to (dum du dum dum....) Empty Your Cache (arrrrr........).
What happens is, your browser is trying to save you time by memorizing the pages you visit most often. It stores them in its Cache so the next time you go to a favorite site, it can just pull up the page from memory so you don’t have to sit and wait for it to go find the page on the internet and load all of those images all over again. This is why, if you click on your “BACK” button and go back to a page you just visited, the images pop up much faster than they did the first time you visited the page. The browser recognizes the page and says “Oh yeah, I know what those pictures look like already.” and gets them for you. This is very nice, but when you are making changes to your web page, or trying to see new changes, it can be annoying.
To empty your cache you will need to open your browser program (Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.). Open your Preferences panel (sometime under Explorer, sometimes under Edit), then to Advanced, and then look for a button in the Cache section that says something like “Empty Cache,” or “Empty Now” (the browsers all have their own ways of saying it). Once you have emptied your cache, revisit the page and the new changes should be there.
If the the new pages you uploaded still aren’t coming up, check and make sure you uploaded the page into the correct folder. One of the most frustrating things about computers is how often you have to admit that it was you who malfunctioned, not the computer. Stand up, stretch, roll your head. It’s all part of earning your website designer stripes.