I have a domain and hosting plan from namecheap.com. when i go to the domain website, i get the splash screen about how the website is not up yet. I have a site from ms publisher that i made into a normal web html, and I need to know where to put it to make it visible. I have the html document or the index/index files to work with. I would like to know if i can just put the single html doc somewhere, like in public html, and make it work. please be specefic as this is my first real website, and i have no knowledge of html ect. thanks

Get yourself an ftp program and upload your site to whatever the public folder is. The public folder can vary from site to site, but it could be anything from public_html or public_www or htdocs or httpdocs or yourdomain.com.

I'm not really sure on this one but i think that if you go to some freewebs thing, you can put it up and then redirect with namecheap to that site. To redirect you got the DNS page and then try the different settings, I think the default one is umm park-your-domain or something, that is where you put the link to yours after u put it on a different site, this isn't really the way you want to do it but it will work. You really want to use namecheap to park the domain and then get a hosting plan for your website. The 1and1.com home hosting plan is good, I have heard though that it is very hard to get them to stop charging you when you want to stop your service.

Like hutch said, get an FTP program. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, a FTP program makes it easy for uploading your files to webspace. You might also want to try going to your site's FTP location. Which is ftp.yoursite.com or ftp://www.yoursite.com. From there directions should be given. If you have Mozilla Firefox installed and is properly running download this program called FireFTP it makes it so easy to upload to your site: http://fireftp.mozdev.org/