Website issues

[Rozmataz]

This is definitely a problem. I have been so busy the last couple of months, I have not addressed it and even though I will be really busy the next 2 weeks - While I am thinking of it - maybe some suggestions can help me.

In 2002 I set up my website thru a friend/ business and was able to "design" it in a template format he had available with his web hosting.

I was advised a while back that he no longer was using this service and subsequently I cannot revise, edit or update my website.

HELP! Where do I go. Is there an easy as well as reasonable way to accomplish this. The "design" is not as sophisticated as I would like to begin with so scrapping the whole thing is an option!!

No rush - since I won't have time to do this til after the holidays - but all info welcome!!

Roz

PS Also, I have no loyalty to this person since his business has moved out of the state...

[ 12-10-2003, 05:18 PM: Message edited by: Rozmataz ]

 

[Mike Labbe]

Hi

Most folks hire the services of a hosting company that physically displays your web page when people type in www.yourdomainname.com. The main advantage to this is the low monthly fee. The monthly hosting fees generally run from $3-$25 per month. I have been using this company and have been very pleased with them so far. (their $8.95 or $13.95 plans are fine for almost all of us)

If your page is on the internet now, it can be transferred to your computer and modified with a graphical program similar to a word processor. Once this is done, it be be transferred back to the hosting provider's server/published to the internet. To do this, you'll require the user name and password assigned to your account.

To edit or create the web (HTML) files, you'll probably want a special editor such as "Dreamweaver", "FrontPage", "Netscape Composer", "Adobe GoLive", or about 20 others. COMPLETE LIST

The other excellent option is to hire a professional. It will probably cost $500-$15,000, depending who it is and how impressive you'd like it to be. If you do hire someone, don't be afraid to pick their brain heavily before handing over any money, and check other sites they have done in the past for references. One great place to hire designers or corporate image packages is www.elance.com. That's where our logo came from a couple years ago.

To keep the site high in rankings, you'll want to balance the right keywords in the title, body, meta tags, etc. Reciprocal links within the same industry are very important, as is keeping it "fresh" with weekly updates.

It's a lot of work to run an effective web program, but it really does attract customers.

I hope this is helpful to get you started!

Mike

[ 12-10-2003, 08:30 PM: Message edited by: Mike-L@GTP ]

 

[Bill Henry-]

My suggestion would be to try to download all of the existing pages. Once you get them on your hard drive, you can upload them to a new host at your leisure.

If your friend let the account expire, you may have to pay back “rent” to get access, though. Your original pages most likely have a control panel access on the host site. Find out from your friend 1) the web site of that host and 2) a username and password to access that control panel.

Once you have determined the path to your web site (it will look something like “domain.com/home/username/domain-www/”, use an ftp: server to download all of the pages to your drive.

I use a program named “Fetch”(it may be Mac specific ?) to upload and download pages and images to and from my web site. There are several freebie ftp programs for Windoze out in the ether if you don't already have one.