I have a website to document my Baseball travels over the years. Except it hasn’t been updated for about 6 or 7 years. I want to remedy that.
I used the late, not-so-great Microsoft FrontPage to create it. I still have the old discs, but haven’t installed them on my current computer. I’d rather not do that, as I’m sure there’s a better way nowadays.
The content is all locked away in a dead hard drive that I have been unable to resuscitate. However, I still own the domain name and I’m still paying the hosting company, so the site still exists in its entirety.
My plan is to re-build the site from the ground up, using the information already on the web. But I am woefully ignorant of the best ways to go about such an endeavor in 2017.
So educate me, please. What software should I use? (If there is some good free-ware out there, all the better.) How best to publish? Help an old half-luddite get into the current decade!
You might have to do a lot of cutting and pasting, as a straight import might not work. Do modern page developing apps have backward compatibility?
I’ll ask much the same question: what’s a decent web-page design app, preferably easy to use for totally rank beginners? (I wrote mine in naked html…and haven’t updated it in…hrm…years.)
I will add that since I posted the OP, I’ve opened a free Wix account. So far I have found it to be very non-intuitive and clumsy to edit. Something a little sleeker would be nice. I plan to experiment with some others soon.
There are literally hundreds of pages. I don’t mind the grunt work of cutting and pasting, and I’m fine with the site having a different look; but I do want it to be simple to organize and edit.
Certainly no need to keep the hosting service if one of the do-it-yourself sites can meet my needs. I would like to keep my domain name (Wix allows this; I assume there are others that do as well). I actually liked working with FrontPage, despite my earlier dig. It was very intuitive, and had an easily changeable tree chart to connect all the pages. But the worst part was that if I wanted to change a single word on a single page, I had to re-publish the entire site. That’s why the dead external hard drive essentially shut the whole thing down. Shame on me for not backing it up elsewhere, I guess.
Second this. Take a look at the offerings of your current host. Some include one-click installers for content management systems such as wordpress or joomla.
I would recommend using some sort of content management system - that’s generally how websites work now - rather than composing it offline then uploading via FrontPage, dreamweaver, etc, you just log in to the CMS and create content directly on the website, from anywhere on the internet.
Off the top of my head, Wix and Weebly are popular and relatively easy to use. I don’t know the specifics of each plan and I don’t use either one, because offering free web space raises questions for me in general and Weebly, I know, has a lot of limitations in page design. Those limits do not stop other people from having fully functional and visually appealing sites though.
Websites aren’t my specialty, I only get involved when friends are quoted $1500 for a Wordpress site or some comparable silliness.
Wix and other similar services tend to work well at the small scale, and if you want to stick with them, but if your site suddenly takes off, or you want to work outside of the restrictions of the free version, the transition can be difficult and/or expensive.
If the site is mostly written content, do you really need a website? How about a blog instead? Or even a Facebook account / page?
You can do a blog for free from any number of providers. Facebook of course is also free.
Imagining using a blog, all you need to do is scrape the content out of each website page and paste it into a blog entry. Then pick up adding new content from there.
My overall point being that in 2017, individual end users creating individual websites from scratch or from kits is very much last century’s way of publishing content. Think of your goal and then use current tech to get there.
I checked this out. The hosting service is USANet, and they do have some build tools, but no free options. I’ve been paying them for years just because I don’t want to lose the content; I certainly don’t want to spend more on a site that doesn’t make any money for me.
We do indeed have a Facebook page, and the current site includes a blog. I plan to keep doing both of those things, but what I also want is a way to catalog our travels both geographically and chronologically, which neither facebook or a blog can do effectively.
I tried Wix and did not like it at all. Then I tried Weebly and liked it a lot. So I think I’m going to stick with that. I’ve already copied over a bunch of pages. The pages themselves are all relatively simple, so Weebly’s design limitations haven’t been a problem. I found a format I like and I’m running with it. Editing is quite easy, and - important because of the sheer number of pages - organizing and connecting the pages is very simple and straightforward. So I think I’ve found my answer!
As a designer I feel the need to chime in on that $1500 price quote which is not at all out of the ballpark. If you’re asking somebody to totally install and set up your wordpress website, customize it for you with logos, color schemes, backgrounds, buttons, maybe put in an additional gallery it doesn’t come with, and start you with some page content, that is absolutely a normal price. It’s different if all they actually do is install wordpress and then hand it to you saying, “have at it”, but I very much doubt that was the case. ahem
Wordpress sounds like what you’re looking for, though. Especially since you already have a domain and hosting. Something that manages the content for you would be ideal for a site with that many pages. You set up what each “journal” page should look like at the start, and then every journal page will follow that scheme. Click add new post, enter your post, and publish, and it does the work of making your content follow the style guidelines you’ve set for all journal pages. If you’ve set it up even better, it will automatically populate “next entry” and “previous entry” if you want that, automatically fill out a calendar with links so you can click by date, or automatically create a list on the side generated by month/year with expandable menus. There are tons of options like that you can pick and choose from, or leave out entirely. With a content management system like wordpress it gets a lot easier to add new content after doing the initial set up. And then if you decide “I don’t like the header like that after all” you can change it en masse across the whole site by changing one setting.
That old saying, if you’re not paying for something, you’re the product? But it’s just suspicion on my part that I have yet to get over. I’m glad you found a solution.
Some friends are just easy prey, that’s all there is to those cases. My hairdresser even, she told me she’d been paying a guy for three months to design her webpage and then he wasn’t returning her calls and she was out $500…for a page. For no page. There’s a lot of…fear, I guess. They hate computers. (!) They don’t know what they want, and what they can have, or what any of it is supposed to cost. So, good on you if you deal with that and wow them and make them happy customers.
The fee for a server to host your website is quite low, probably insignificant compared with the other costs of a hobby. And that already-low fee could be cut in half if two like-minded hobbyists join together (paying the extra $2/year for an extra domain name, or whatever it is). Hosting packages often provide free web development tools, e-mail services, etc.
You’re not wrong. I’ve been paying about 60 bucks a quarter for my current hosting, which is not a fortune, but more than the $95 a year for the lowest-level Weebly account. What that buys you is more customizable editing options and the removal of Weebly branding from the pages.
I’m not opposed to paying for web space. So far, though, the free version is meeting my needs quite nicely, so I’m not rushing to hand over my cash.
I now pay $4.95/month for the Lunarpages Basic Plan. That includes “unlimited” disk space (I use several gigabytes), and many other features (and complete(*) control over my content). Customer response to complaints or questions has always been very prompt and very helpful.
Frankly, I don’t understand how they could be making a profit! (I’ve wondered if they’re able to get revenue from the Internet traffic in some other way — are they a front for the NSA? :rolleyes: )
(* - They did disable my server-side scripts when I foolishly wrote an infinite loop :smack:, but I think they’ll reinstate me, if/when I write them a polite e-mail.)
I agree! This is a good piece of advice! I also use wordpress, it’s very convinient. And now there are wordpress systems that have a wide range of templates like Bootstrap Themes . Its advantage is in possibility to see how your finished website will look.