Website help
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Ouch, sounds like your biggest problem is with email. Not sure anything I can say will help you, but as you have another address, I guess you emailed all your clients, beginning with the currently active ones to use that address. Did you ask your current primary email service advisor to forward all messages to the new address. How do you manage your email, I use "Outlook", allowing me to access all of my mail automatically in one place regardless of which account has the email. I am also able to do mass mailing from that application.
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if you like the gmail interface, you can also use it with your own domain instead of ...@gmail.com. I have that at my work-e-mail...
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I also think that Wordpress is the way to go. There are some hosts that offer one-click installation of Wordpress and then all you have to do is choose a template and find some plugins for creating an image gallery.
When I'm at my PC tomorrow I'll put together some links for potential hosts. Preumably you'd prefer a company based in the States?
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I use http://www.powweb.com Great price, tons of space and bandwidth. Unlimited domains associated to one account (I own like 10 websites that all run off my 1 account). They have an easy click installer for wordpress, and lots of software. THey help set up payment stuff so you can take payments, on and on.
They are pretty good on support. I have not had any hosting problems for a long time. Biggest problem is that they are not great on speed. The wiki I ran almost became unseable because it just got bogged down when I was getting tens of thousands of hits a day.
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MS live intends to shut down, and offered to move me to WordPress, so I did. Wounder whats up? I read some pages on MSs strategy to partner with others. MS live has 30 million clients compared with 14 million at WordPress.
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There is one big difference (if I understand MS sites at all).
WP is a single, downloadable software package you can install anywhere independently from any "sites", hosts, whatever.
Surely for those who do not have their own domains and hosts, they provide a hosting package as well but still, you can go on your own. Until the development of the software is stopped (that I would doubt with one of the most popular ones), you get in no trouble (unless your host is down).
For this reason however (any company can be down temporarily), I would not take it unprofessional to have a secondary email address let it be a free email like gmail. (I am currently in the same boat with one of my domains and email addresses)
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I moved host twice in my on-line lifetime.
The first time was a disaster, but taught me a lot about the process!
The second time was, by contrast, a much smoother process.
The painless way seems to be to find a new host and set up a dummy domain there to get everything working.
Next, you have to go through the process of migrating your domain. Your new host should have full instructions on how to do this. There are restrictions - the transfer may not be immediately possible if you are close to the domain renewal date, for example. Some security measure to prevent the domain being hijacked, I think.
As soon as the transfer is complete, you can upload your website content and set up your mail boxes. There may be a period when your site and email are unavailable as it can take time for the new domain registration to be recognised across the Internet, but I did not find this to be an issue.
As a backup I use ContactOffice - a wonderful tool that allows me to manage multiple email accounts from a single login (and also manages to cicrcumvent webmail blocking that some companies implement.) There are various plans, including a free account, and you get another email address that can be your backup.
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@chris fullmer said:
I use http://www.powweb.com
I was going to mention them as well. I've also heard good things about
bluehost.com & dreamhost.com, but I haven't used either as I prefer to stick to hosting companies run from my own country. -
As for CMS, take a look at Joomla. Its the CMS that the Thea website uses. Its easy to install and can be configured to your requirements via graphical templates, a multitude of plugins and a solid backend administration panel that allows you to edit your site from any PC.
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The Rolls of easy making Website is Weebly
Sure in normal basic way you have not a total control of the presentation as you must take at the beginning a template (you can make your own..) but what a speedy efficacity: in an hour you can make a very strong site whithout any effort!
And whithout any knowlege of building site!
So if you have yet made some sites in the past that will be candy thing
Of course all modern functions are inside, infinite blogs, Forum, E-business etc...
Yes it's even free!
You can have a Pro version if you want but...
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The problem is that once you have come to a decision to move you may be knee-deep in a dispute with your hosting provider who can often be fairly un-cooperative in these circumstances. This can make it tricky to get your existing domain released/transferred and get up and running elsewhere.
A strategy that will enable you to change hosts in a couple of hours would be to purchase your domain url through an entity un-associated with your hosting space provider.
You simply point your domain to the hosting space url of your current provider and you never have to struggle with getting the domain transferred. When things go wrong you can move your website content to a new provider and just point your domain to the new provider. You can do this in an hour or less with no downtime because re-pointing can be done in minutes from a control panel without losing any links or email addresses once you have your website re-loaded on a secondary server.This is also a good set-up if you have to reload a new site design from time to time. You can upload the new site to an alternate web folder and just point the domain to it when it is ready to go. If your website is critical such a set-up will allow you to have a second dormant clone of your website hosted elsewhere to which you can point your domain if the primary hosting server fails.
The domain pointing company that I use to do this is http://www.123-reg.co.uk but there are probably others that will allow you to use the same strategy.
The control panel provided by their website also allows you to point domain email addresses to any others your may use. -
ArchDaily just posted this great article:
Tips for an Architect’s website
Excellent general tips, applicable to most people working in 3D as well as architects.
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