Do You have a website?

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electricmanscott

electricmanscott

Senior Member
Location
Boston, MA
I was thinking of building a webpage. I checked out the domain name and it is available. After that I have no idea who to register with, how to set up the site etc. I did alot of reading and am now more confused then when I knew nothing. Any tips, ideas or such would be appreciated.. I guess I am a website diyer. :grin:
 
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Someday I'll get around to finishing this thing...but for now, all I did was "claim the name". http://celticelectric.org/default.aspx

Some guys like godaddy.com ...they cost a few bucks...but for what and how long I have no idea.
 
Most broadband ISPs provide some amount of "free" webspace with your service.

It's generally not enough space to set-up a large "full-blown" web site, but it can give you a great place to experiment and figure out what you really want.
 
electricmanscott said:
I was thinking of building a webpage. I checked out the domain name and it is available. After that I have no idea who to register with, how to set up the site etc. I did alot of reading and am now more confused then when I knew nothing. Any tips, ideas or such would be appreciated.. I guess I am a website diyer. :grin:
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Depends on how computer literate you are and how much you want to pay.

Someone else recommended GoDaddy.com -- they are fairly cheap and provide good service. From there you need to find someplace to host your website unless you've got a teenager at home who's up to date on the latest everything.

After that, it's all about the money. The more you have the better your website gets.

If you're looking for tools to have your children study so they can design it for you for free (no, really -- kids are great at this stuff), look into MacroMedia Flash, DreamWeaver and some other tools my son learned how to use back when he was 12 years old and in college.

If you decide to go the "host your own server" route, for operating systems nothing can beat GenToo Linux (I run it at home -- very nice and costs $0.00), for web servers go with Apache (same thing Mike runs here), and PHP and MySQL for backend software.
 
Reserve the name now with Networksolutions.com. I was a web designer for a number of years for Philips and on my own. Get the name while you can and sort out the rest when and how later.

I think it cost less than $100.00 for the year and it includes space on a server for your webpage. Their customer support is excellent and walk first timers through the process all the time. Excellent company.
 
NoVA Comms Power said:
Most broadband ISPs provide some amount of "free" webspace with your service.

It's generally not enough space to set-up a large "full-blown" web site, but it can give you a great place to experiment and figure out what you really want.
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ISPs are likely going to charge for traffic, or cancel your service if your traffic exceeds some small amount. Before anyone sets up a commercial website, make sure your Terms Of Service specify how much traffic you get per month and whether or not you can run a web server.

The other-other thing is make sure you have a sufficiently high transmission data rate. Cable is asymmetrical with the receiver side about 20 times faster than the transmitter side, and DSL is just plain slow. Data transmission is not an issue for most web users since the TCP ACKs are tiny little packets compared to the data packets being ACK'd. But when you start sending streams of MTU sized packets upstream, expect things to get really s-l-o-w.
 
Oh -- and to answer the ORIGINAL question, yes I do, not that any of y'all have ever gone to my profile and clicked the link for my home page ...
 
tallgirl said:
Oh -- and to answer the ORIGINAL question, yes I do, not that any of y'all have ever gone to my profile and clicked the link for my home page ...
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Not that we can, as it asks for a username and password.

Ours, which Patricia's daughter (and our office manager) is working on, is: fineelectricco.com

(Like the staff photo?)

The old one, my first, that I did with homemade graphics and raw HTML: fineelectricco.com/old
 
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LarryFine said:
Not that we can, as it asks for a username and password.

Ours, which Patricia's daughter (and our office manager) is working on, is: fineelectricco.com

(Like the staff photo?)

The old one, my first, that I did with homemade graphics and raw HTML: fineelectricco.com/old
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Yes, and it tells you which ones to use.

I changed the text so it should be more obvious.

(Edited to add ...)

I just checked out your old and new websites and prefer the old to the new. There are certain human factors and usability problems with the new one. The biggy has to do with background colors and text. Or rather, the lack of text. Using images instead of actual text is a usability nightmare. It also doesn't allow the browser to flow the text according to the user's browser orientation, etc. If you'd like to see something I designed about 10 years ago with raw HTML, check out http://home.austin.rr.com/txjulie. Try resizing your browser and the various frames. Notice the way everything dynamically resizes itself.
 
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I had my site done professionally a few years ago. I paid $2500 and they would have done whatever I wanted. It is a friend of mine who built it and hosts it. I also do a lot of electrical work for him. I probably could have got a lot more for my money than I did, but I threw it together fairly quickly. He'd have done more if I wanted him to. I didn't have the time to do any more. I have a number of things I'd like to add, but haven't got around to. Here it is http://www.ericksonelectric.net/ if it's ok to post here. My goal was to introduce what we do, but also to let customers get an idea of what things look like.
 
electricmanscott said:
Thanks for the info and tips. John I like your site. I am going to try and come up with something.
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Thanks Scott. I guess that like anything you do, you come up with ideas afterwards that would be improvements. The good thing is that it's easy enough to change and add to. I just haven't got around to it.

It's much more fun I guess spending my time on here.;)
 
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