I cant activate my web sharing in system preferences

Question

I cant activate my web sharing in system preferences, what do I do ?
tks for help...

Answer 1

Here's a quickly copy and pasted excert from David Pogue's book, Lion: The Missing Manual...
Firing Up Web Sharing
Here’s how you turn your Mac into a low-budget Web site: Put the HTML documents, graphics, and files you want to publish into your Home → Sites folder. Every account’s Home folder has a Sites folder, and therefore the Mac can actually serve up lots of Web sites at once. Your Web site’s home page, by the way, won’t appear unless it’s named index.html. (Apple has already put an index.html document into your Sites folder, just to give you the idea; feel free to replace it.) And the other files you put in Sites aren’t accessible unless they’re linked from your index.html page.
Open System Preferences; click Sharing. Turn on the Web Sharing radio button.
Use the Sharing System Preferences pane to make designated folders on your hard drive available to anyone on your network. Note that your Mac’s IP address, shown here in underlined type, works only when people connect from across the local network. It probably won’t work from across the Internet; see the box on the facing page. You’ve just made the contents of your Sites folder available to anyone who connects to your Mac. Also note the line below the Computer Name box. That’s your Mac’s Bonjour name, which is a bit friendlier than its IP address. Send your network address to your friends and coworkers
People on your local office network can use your Mac’s Bonjour name to connect. It appears at the top of the Sharing pane, as shown in Figure 22-1. For example, your colleagues can type http:// office-mac.local/ ~ chris into their Web browsers, where office-mac.local is your Mac’s Bonjour name and chris is your short user name. If other people will be connecting from the Internet, you need to figure out your public IP address; as noted in the box on The IP Address Mess: Port Forwarding, that might be your router’s IP address, not your Mac’s. Your Mac Web site’s address might be, for example, http:// 111.222.3.44/ ~ chris/ (the number is your public IP address, and the name should be your short user name). Don’t forget the final slash. Tell your friends to bookmark it so they won’t have to remember all that. You’ve just put your Mac-based Web page on the Internet for all to see— that is, all who know your secret Web address. Maybe you’ll want to distribute the address only to other people on your office network, using your tiny Web site as a distribution source for documents. Or maybe you’ll want to go whole-hog, hosting an e-commerce Web site (read on). The Mac’s Own Web Site The instructions above show you how to create a Web site in your Home → Sites folder. In other words, they guide you through the process of creating a personal Web site. But if you have an Administrator account (Chapter   12), you can also put your Web pages into the main hard drive window’s Library → WebServer → Documents folder. This is your Mac’s main Web site folder, and its address is simply, for example, http:// 111.222.3.44/. That is, it’s just your public IP address, no user name needed. (Here again, if people will be connecting from across your office network, they can replace the IP number with your Mac’s Bonjour name.) Working with this primary Web site folder is only slightly different from the personal ones described above. Because you’re now working inside an official Mac OS X system folder, you must mind your permissions. Using the File → Get Info command, you should set up the permissions of any folders and documents inside the Library → Web-Server → Documents folder (an Images folder, for example). That way, you can ensure that you’re in control of which visitors are allowed to do what with your Web documents. The Easiest Way to Distribute Files Here’s a handy secret: If there isn’t a document whose name is index.html in your Sites folder (or index.html.en in your Library → WebServer → Documents folder), then visitors see, in their browsers, a handy list of the files that are in that folder (see Figure   21-2). This is a terrific convenience: It offers a quick, simple way for you to make a bunch of documents available for downloading. All your visitors have to do is click one of these file names. It downloads immediately, no matter what kind of computer your Web visitor is using.
Pogue, David (2011-10-19). Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual: The Missing Manual (pp. 816-817). OReilly Media - A. Kindle Edition.
Maybe this will help? It will at least bump the message up again!
Clinton