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Non GAA Discussion => General discussion => Topic started by: bud on February 10, 2009, 02:13:47 PM

Title: Setting up a Website
Post by: bud on February 10, 2009, 02:13:47 PM
Have a wee bit of experience of htlm.
Need a website, nothing special.
Couple of pages, with text & pictures.
What is the eway to do this, Frontpage??

How do i go about hosting it etc?
Where is the best place to get a domain name?
How much would you expect to pay for the domain and hosting?
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: C_Berg_316 on February 10, 2009, 02:20:07 PM
Frontpage/Dreamweaver probably your best bet if you want something simple.

http://www.123-reg.co.uk/ isnt a bad site for hosting/getting your domain name, etc.  Not 100% of the prices.

Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: thejuice on February 10, 2009, 02:31:39 PM
I've been looking to do this as well. Will keep an eye on this thread.
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: Treasurer on February 10, 2009, 02:46:32 PM
I'm with blacknight in Tipp and haven't had a problem.  www.blacknight.com (http://www.blacknight.com)

I started off with raw html.  Depends how far you want to take it, freebie little packages like edit plus can get you there but I find Dreamweaver the business - although I'm not sure how easy it would be to figure out from scratch, without doing some sort of quick course in it.

My last bill was €9.98 for .com domain and €60 for my hosting.

HTH
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: Hardy on February 10, 2009, 02:50:40 PM
I use Letshost.ie - very happy with them. Hosting for €7.95 per month if you pay monthly or down to €3.95/month if you pay 24 months in advance and you can have up to 25 separate sites for this single payment. They handle domain registration and all and provide more than adequate capacity, email addresses, etc. and good support.
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: Mhic Easmuint on February 10, 2009, 03:14:26 PM
Yep probably a program like Frontpage or Dreamweaver would be good.  Ideally dreamweaver. 
Use 123-reg.co.uk for all my domains. 

Recently took a hosting account with http://hosting.digiweb.ie/
€40 for the year and a .com domain name for €6.99

They have a cheaper hosting package at €20 a year but thats Linux Hosting. 
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: Croí na hÉireann on February 10, 2009, 03:19:57 PM
Will be setting up one shortly as well. Any insight into the differences between Windows and Linux Hosting as I haven't looked into it yet???
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: bud on February 10, 2009, 03:20:49 PM
Cheers, i done a bit of googling before hand and 123-reg looked decent enough.
Might try it for the domain name.

If i was to have to a review section would i need to add muchextra functionality?
Not that keen on the programming side of things so the easiest way i can do this the better!

Thanks again!
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: Mhic Easmuint on February 10, 2009, 03:26:15 PM
If new to it, it might be easier getting domain and hosting with same company.  It will then all be automatically be set up for you.
Otherwise you'll have to change the nameservers of the domain to point to your hosting. 

What do you mean a review section?  Where users need to post things? 


If your just building a standard html site then either will do. 
If doing some programming with .asp or asp.net then you would need Windows Hosting (also supports other languages)
Linux Supports other programming languages. 
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: bud on February 10, 2009, 04:08:08 PM
Quote from: Mhic Easmuint on February 10, 2009, 03:26:15 PM

Where users need to post things? 


Yeah Mhic, did i need to add something extra, i wouldn't get in frontpage?
Cheers!
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: Mhic Easmuint on February 10, 2009, 04:15:11 PM
I don't think this could be done in front page. 
This would need some sort of database behind it. 
I would usually program that sort of thing. 

There may be some free script available which provide something similiar to what you need though.
E.g. http://www.hotscripts.com/ASP/Scripts_and_Components/Guestbooks/index.html

Most of them are probably a matter of just copying and pasting. 
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: take_yer_points on February 10, 2009, 04:27:02 PM
Is it possible to host your own website over the web on an XP machine (with a static IP address) or would you need Server 2003 (or a similar OS)?
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: Mhic Easmuint on February 10, 2009, 04:56:28 PM
Yep possible but wouldn't do it. 
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: take_yer_points on February 10, 2009, 06:44:53 PM
Quote from: Mhic Easmuint on February 10, 2009, 04:56:28 PM
Yep possible but wouldn't do it. 

Why not? Security issues?
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: joebloggs on February 10, 2009, 06:49:27 PM
Get hosting with blacknight.ie support service is excellent.
The use a cms to set up your website. Joomla, Wordpress are some of the more common ones and you can have a fairly good website set up with very little hassle. Having your own ip and running the computer all the time would near cost as much as getting hosting from a provider and would give you more hassle.
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: nifan on February 10, 2009, 06:59:22 PM
Quote from: take_yer_points on February 10, 2009, 06:44:53 PM
Quote from: Mhic Easmuint on February 10, 2009, 04:56:28 PM
Yep possible but wouldn't do it. 

Why not? Security issues?
Loads of issues security issues, speed ( the speed your net connection is quoted at is for download - upload is usually much slower particularly on ASDL) etc.

To be honest if someone is not sure if this is possible, they dont know enough to be going near it.

Far easier and safer to pay for hosting.
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: bud on February 11, 2009, 09:15:10 AM
Cheers Mhic, i'll try and put some of this into practice!
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: Croí na hÉireann on April 17, 2009, 01:49:26 PM
Anyone any tips for helping search engines to see your site??? I used the Blacknight meta tag builder and included the code in the head of the homepage. I've also registered the site with the main search engines but they say it can take a while for them to include the site in their searches. It's been nearly a month at this stage, how long does it take and is there any way to speed up the process???
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: Treasurer on April 17, 2009, 03:07:07 PM
Can take anything from hours to months.  I don't know it's still the case but it used to help if you registered with directories such as DMOZ (the only one that I can think of now).
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: nifan on April 17, 2009, 03:18:49 PM
The actual formulas search engines use is a guarded secret.

The more sites that link to your site the better you will score in most of these however.
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: Mhic Easmuint on April 17, 2009, 03:45:40 PM
Use the main key words (words/terms ppl would be searching for) in the title.  And have the title changing throughout your site for the different pages to make it more appropriate. If its a products website have the title bar display the name of the product. 

Use alot of your keywords in your homepage.
Keep your code clean.  Some sites have alot of javascript in the header tags which adds alot of clutter for search engines to filter through to find the useful information on your site. 

Submit a site map to the likes of google.  That way they find every page on your website.

Friendly URLs. e.g.

http://www,mysite.com/products/productname   instead of.
http://www,mysite.com/products.aspx?id=24
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: nifan on April 17, 2009, 03:58:33 PM
Quote from: Mhic Easmuint on April 17, 2009, 03:45:40 PM
Use alot of your keywords in your homepage.

Some search engines are though to limit the number of keywords they will use to prevent the meta tag bombing phenomena where people put everything under the sun in there.

Same as when they put huge amounts of keywords as "invisible" text at the end of pages to try and up their hits.
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: Croí na hÉireann on April 17, 2009, 05:10:39 PM
Thanks folks. Registered with DMOZ and will have a look for some more like that. Must also get around to submitting a site map...
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: nifan on April 17, 2009, 05:13:13 PM
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html (http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html)

some info on page rank.
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: The Watcher Pat on April 17, 2009, 06:59:49 PM
Quote from: nifan on April 17, 2009, 03:58:33 PM
Quote from: Mhic Easmuint on April 17, 2009, 03:45:40 PM
Use alot of your keywords in your homepage.

Some search engines are though to limit the number of keywords they will use to prevent the meta tag bombing phenomena where people put everything under the sun in there.

Same as when they put huge amounts of keywords as "invisible" text at the end of pages to try and up their hits.

Aye they put any keywords to get a link to the site.

I remember reading about a Tottenham Hotspur site that had one of the keywords "Champions league"

;D ;D ;D ;D
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: thewobbler on April 17, 2009, 10:24:12 PM
If you build your site using logical structures, i.e. placing headers and content in the correct order, together with good, relevant META information, then before long Google will place you correctly in the natural order of things. You can spend a lot of time and money tweaking and twisting the Google algorithm, but it's almost like Catch 22 once you go up that road; to maintain your artifically high position, you have to keep retracing your steps. Get the nuts and bolts right at the start and it's the best medicine of all.


In terms of HTML, use logically ordered mark-up. The order you read content should be the order it is placed. There should only be one H1 tag on a page. H2s, H3s etc should be nested appropriately. Use UL/LI and DD/DT tags for lists and for navigation, not images, and not tables. Don't use images for headers without an image replacement technique. Have a sitemap, and preferably an XML sitemap in the background.

In terms of META information, use targetted descriptions and keywords for your company name, products, services, expertise and crucially, location - but don't overdo them. Short, relevant descriptions serve a better purpose than long-winded, catch-all descriptions on every page.


Do submit your site to as many search engines as possible, and if time allows, set up reciprocal accounts on the likes of Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Youtube, Flickr and LinkdIn. These shouldn't require a lot of maintenance once you've them up and running - their purpose is to direct people to your site.



Regarding hosting, traditional ASP is a dying language, and .NET can be a bit of a f*cker to get started in - so I'd recommend avoiding Windows Servers. LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) is normally a cheaper, easier to upgrade, easier to get help with solution - and the fact that Wordpress, Joomla etc. are more easily customisable with Linux is a big plus for beginners.

I've used hosting-unlimited.net a few times and have found them to be excellent. If you exceed the limits of their £20 p/a account then you must be doing sometihing very right (or very, very wrong!) with your site.

123-reg are cheap but they'e one nasty shower of b*st*rds to deal with and I'd avoid them if possible.   
Title: Re: Setting up a Website
Post by: ArmaghGAAforum on April 17, 2009, 11:34:07 PM
if your looking to host just basic html pages and pictures then good free hosting is the cheapest.  try 000webhost.com for decent free hosting.

want a free .co.uk or similar other domains then check out this thread, http://whatsyourview.net/forum/f41/100-free-co-uk-domain-names-17223/ you may need to reg to see it but it works a treat and safe.