Publishing your Site
It is one thing to write a site, but another to actually get it on the web. There are various ways that you can get your work on the web. You can FTP your pages to a server that will display the pages as they are requested, edit your work online via some sort of page or HTML editor, or even post your work to appropriate newsgroups in some cases.
Keeping out of Trouble
Quite a lot of the free web hosts available like to have control over what you can and can't have on your site. One of the easiest ways of controlling what you can add to their server is to remove FTP access and allow access only via a special members area, which may or may not include the use of an online editor.
A lot of the free web hosts have some kind of online editor or file uploading script (either separately or some sort of integrated solution). By limiting access to their servers in this way they have a lot more control over how you can use your web space with them; thus making it easier for them to find people potentially abusing their services. By using the interface they provide they can check to see if the file you are uploading is acceptable for use on their servers; it will probably check that the format of the file agrees with the extension and that the file size is not too large. For example, if you had made a download that was a large self extracting executable (ending in .exe) you may get an error if you try to upload it as most of the free services do not allow you to host executables.
Online Editors
How you feel about online editors will depend on your experience and level of expertise. They make the perfect tool for anyone that is new to HTML or doesn't know the first thing about FTP, as you can build a page by filling in a form giving you numerous choices for colors and pictures. There are also problems with using editors like these however, the main one being that you usually have to be connected to the internet to be able to work on your site. While this may not be such a big deal for our American friends, there are still places in the world where Internet access is charged per minute; people in such countries will probably want the option of creating a page offline.
Another disadvantage of these editors is that sites made with a particular editor tend to look the same; they are usually based on some kind of template and the choices you get are often limited. Such a "look" is not limited to those using online editors however, just ask anyone who has used any of the Microsoft FrontPage® series; I'm sure they would be able to spot which sites were using one of the standard templates, even if the owners had used some of their own graphics to make it a little different.
Online File Management Tools
Such tools are usually the intermediate step between creating a web site online and creating one offline and using FTP. You would create your site offline using the page editor of your choice, and then when you are ready to let everyone see it you would log into your account with your host at their web site; where you might have forms to allow you to upload things to your web space.
A typical tool of this type would allow you to list all the files and folders in your web space, to rename, delete and even edit them in an advanced HTML editor of some sort. Advanced HTML editors such as the one in use by Yahoo Geocities assume that you have some knowledge of HTML to be able to edit the code yourself if you want to edit the files on their servers. While this kind of system will require you to log in at the web host's site to be able to use it, it functions more like FTP and so will make a good compromise for those that don't want to work online, but who don't have any idea about how to FTP.
The main advantage of making use of such an online file management tool is that you can usually use any web page editor to make your site. However, as most of the forms only allow for uploading and editing on the server, you may find it difficult to make a backup copy of a page you edited online.
My own experience with the online editors and file management tools provided with free web space is somewhat limited because I actually pay for my web space for the features that I get with it. For this reason I will not go into any detail on how to use them here because any good web host using such a system should also have good documentation to support it.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
This is probably one of the quickest ways of getting your site online as FTP was designed with the specific purpose of transferring files from one computer to another. Unfortunately, not all hosts support FTP as it gives the user much more control with respect to uploading and renaming files. While some FTP editors will support the editing of files, you will find the typical FTP editor will download the file to your computer before you can make the changes and upload the new version to the server, a process that can be cumbersome.
The main advantage of using FTP over online editors is the fact that it makes taking backups of your site so much easier. To make a backup, you only need to log into your account via FTP and download all the files you want copies of to some directory on your hard drive; should something go wrong or your need to move your site, you can simply upload the backup to a server.