Web Hosting and Design Templates for a noob please

[Zak33]

Hi guys,

Long long story....short.

My Dad has a massive interest in flora of the UK. His digital archive is big enough to be scary. He intended, long long ago in the 35mm film era, to publish a book.

2009 jumps up and smacks he and I in the face. I need a web company, with solid hosting, and I need webpage templates to upload too.

I need to pay for a domain, and give him control. Scary... but that's what I need.

The more basic, the more reliable and the more bullet proof.. the better.

How, who and where guys... how, who and where?

[Saracen]

My first point would be to buy the domain yourself, and not get it via the hosting company. I use 123Reg. A .co.uk address is about £3 a year, and a .com about a tenner.

Some hosting accounts come with a "free" domain name, but there are two risks with that, IMHO. First, it might be free in year one, but after that? Secondly, exactly who has administrative control over the domain name? If you own it directly, and want to change hosting company, you simply get the new hosting, create the site and change where the domain name points. Job done. But if they have to hand it over to you, well, is it free of charge when they do? How long will it take? Will they even do it at all?

Nah, for £3 a year, it's not worth the hassle and potential risk with a freebie. And, of course, for most sites that are half popular, the name, once established, is a valuable asset. Make sure it's your asset.


Secondly, hosting. Well, that's a bit like saying you want a new car. Ford or Ferrari? Sports car or chelsea tractor? What hosting you need will depend on what you expect the site to do, and especially how busy you expect it to be.


Next, you say templates to "upload" to, and that it's "scary" giving him control. Have you come across the concept of a CMS .... Content Management System?

Put simply, it separates the design of a site from the content on it. Consider, oh, a national magazine. If you insist on all content going to an editor, who has to upload it, you give that editor a lot of work. If you have the contributors fill in an online form, which involves nothing more than filling in a few fields (name, article title, etc) and pasting in the text, the system then presents that article for publication, but probably gives an editor the chance to review/amend it before it does. The system I use defines permissions whereby a contributor might be able to post direct to published article and be able to 'authorise' articles by other contributors (i.e. you're an editor), or might be able to directly publish your own articles, but not able to authorise others (i.e. a trusted writer), or you might just be able to upload work, but it has to be authorised by someone else before it appears on the web (i.e. a standard writer).

When any of those articles are authorised, they either go through a a kind of publication machine and are turned onto static pages via pre-defined templates, or the data goes into a database, and pages are dynamically generated, again via pre-defined templates.

The beauty of this is that if you change the design of the template the publicly visible site design will change and existing content be presented in a new way, and the people submitting the content don't need to have anything to do with the site design. So in that magazine example I gave, you have a professional designer (or team) responsible for site development, but they know nothing about the content, and you have a series of writers providing content that know, and need to know, nothing about the site design or templates.

And if you extend that concept a but further, then the site menu, links management, colour control, user management and permissions settings, database structure and so on can all be controlled via the CMS .

Of course the disadvantage is that a complex CMS can be harder to set up in the first place, and may well be more expensive to buy, but it is very simple in day to day operation for non-technical people to manage the site, because the webby bits are kept separate and they only need to worry about content.

As I said, a lot depends on the nature of this project, whether it's commercial or a personal project or hobby, and what the budget for it is.

[PeteSmith]

Just adding to the CMS comment from Saracen, you can get some really solid CMS solutions for your own web server, Joomla springs to mind. It's not all that difficult to setup, very popular, lot's of support available on the web, and it's free. The content is stored in a MySQL database and there are many front end templates to call on if you want to change the look and feel.

On another note, have you considered a blog approach, you can get some pretty decent blogging platforms, Wordpress for example. Combined with a few add-ins for photo galleries and your all set. You could create a very smart and user friendly site from either of these.

Also if your inclined, you could set both up on your own webserver, and host them locally. Although you should consider your bandwidth requirements 1st. Worth considering.

[scaryjim]

+1 to domain purchases through 123-reg - used them for many years and never been dissappointed with their service. Also they affiliate to Quidco, so you can get cash back.

They offer hosting through sister company webfusion, who I have a VPS with, but I'm not entirely happy with the service I've been getting recently (my VPS has been down due to network issues twice), so I'm hesitant to recommend them. Unfortunately, I've not used any other hosting for many years (I'm lucky enough to have dedicated webservers with a T1-class link at work ), so I'm not up on who are meant to be good. Your main issue is likely to be disk space - I'd recommend that you work out how many of the photos are going to be hosted and at what size / compression rate, because you may not find many options with sufficient storage for large amounts of high-res pictures...

[Disturbedguy]

Zak I dont know much about the hosting side of things, but try to look for somewhere that offers e107, very simple to use and get the hang of and on top of that, plenty of free themes out there.

[0iD]

My kids have accounts with 1&1, their inbuilt web builder software is basic, but easy to use. Reliable, but not the cheapest.

[Rob_B]

So has anything better than these options come up in the last few months?

Need a site for something my wife is doing, need reasonable bandwidth, shop function & bog standard design, will only be a few images & a bit fo info so nothing spectacular!

Looked at 123 but it's £6 for the reg (fine) then hosting @ £2.50/month, shop @ £9/month..for a small project we don't know the interest in it's getting expensive! £282 for 2yrs.

Help!