Years ago there were many times when I found myself wanting to change a picture or edit a file that was on my company website. I was always studying it and endlessly pursuing improvements, but I hated having to pay the website design company for each and every change. I knew changes had to be easy to do, as simple as swapping out or editing and saving existing files, but I did not know exactly how to access the files.
What I learned after some research, was that I needed a program called an FTP client. The FTP client is the program that accesses and transfers files between a base computer and a web hosting server. Apparently there are dozens of these available. In fact, even my web host company has one built into their control panel. I did not know how to use this function so I logged into their online chat support. The funny thing is, that the support technician suggested I not use their internal FTP client, but that I use the free FTP client known as Filezilla. He said it was very easy to use and that I would be able to use it on any web host, not just the one he worked for.
I then proceeded to install Filezilla and edit files at my convenience and without being charged by my web design company. As I became more and more involved in the actual coding of my website I realized that Filezilla was actually a very popular and powerful program. It was also very simple to use. I could transfer files at varied predetermined speeds depending on how my computer was using and allocating the total available bandwidth from my internet connection. I could also save the connection information from several web hosts in one single place making it easy to manage files for several sites hosted on different servers.
The fact that Filezilla used a drag and drop way of selecting and moving files was only something I appreciated when I had to use a different FTP client one day, and found that I needed to type in file paths for each transferred file. That was not only amazingly tedious but also made it very easy to make critical mistakes. Filezilla has been my preferred FTP client for years now and I cannot recommend it enough to the beginner or even the most advanced programmer/coder. Of course, the advanced programmer/coder does not need my recommendation, they are most likely already using it.