somebody I work with has had a second catastrophic failure of a 1and1 website, and although extra is paid for twice daily back-ups, a reload has not been forthcoming :rant:

so...

where to now?

this site has numerous pages, and a multitude of photo's
it has daily changes to it's content
it needs to support a shop
it needs to be quick and easy to change
hosting needs to be 'economical' as it's for a charity

... and the site needs to be back up and running yesterday!!


does anybody have any suggestions as to who to sign up with, what to do as a quick fix and what to do long term?

at the moment, we're looking at iWeb, but that doesn't appear to have shop facilities. I'm not sure how big a site BT support. Is it an option to build the website in another location and just create a divert from the old site until the contract is officially terminated?

... and what are the chances of getting a refund for all the money spent on the package for back-ups when it looks like that was just futile?

Other than myself (nudge nudge, wink wink;))

Fuzioned (http://www.fuzioned.co.uk) I cant reccomend this company highly enough for their support, they may not be the cheapest, but certainly aren't expensive.

Strix - your inbox is full. :)

www.easyinternetsolutions.co.uk
This is the hosting site I use, I don't know if it's any help to you but it's reasonably priced and I think you'll be able to load your site straight onto this one.

I use this site here: http://www.streamline.net/ and can't recommend them highly enough. Their charges are cheap to start with but offer half price for charities.

i use www.lanette.co.uk as it is runby my mate :), ive never had any issues and teh server perfomance is fantastic :)

thanks guys - we'll have a look at all those :)

Sorry Joe - It's like that on purpose

when's a good time to phone you? - or you can get me online by another method

I use this site here: http://www.streamline.net/ and can't recommend them highly enough. Their charges are cheap to start with but offer half price for charities.they do look good, but they have a limit of 30 pages for a business website, and I've a sneaking suspicion this one is up to 72 pages already, and as it's providing a web presence and maintenance for other much smaller charities, it still has the probability of expanding :(

Strix, I use the Home user package two of my sites and the limit is 250 mb - both sites have more than 30 pages (although the number of pages doesn't equate to overall size as it depends what's loaded on each page).

Certainly the Unlimited option (green banding) at £33.99 pa + VAT then 50% repayable for charities which gives UNLIMITED webspace and UNLIMITED visitor bandwidth isn't to be sniffed at? See this page here: http://www.streamline.net/uu.php

hmm, that was the bit I was looking at but that 'unlimited' seemed to have smallprint of 70 pages

do you know if they can support our hit-rate of up to 1200 per DAY?

I'm just looking at the wizard at the mo

QiQ (Hosting)
http://www.qiq.co.uk/technology_host.php

Ya get a lot for your money! Maggi often recommends them too.
Fast and efficient customer support too :)

Sorry Strix but I really can't see the smallprint to which you are referring - can you post a link to it here?

I have no reason to believe they cannot support your traffic.

They also offer the first 3 months free!

Sorry Strix but I really can't see the smallprint to which you are referring - can you post a link to it here?

I have no reason to believe they cannot support your traffic.

They also offer the first 3 months free!
sheesh - I thought I was losing my marbles there! took me ages to find it again!!
http://www.streamline.net/sw.php

okay - having had a natter with Jaq and Joe, it looks like we're best off with some independent web building software (so we can migrate if necessary, the webbuilder being the big tie in that's caused the problem last time the site crashed) and a host for that (though we have that sorted if we can find an wysiwyg webbuilder)

we've looked at the iWeb software - but does that only work if they host it?

does anybody have any suggestions for non-HTML web building software?

does anybody have any suggestions for non-HTML web building software?

Namu 6 is supposed to be good....
http://namu6.com/9290/

and NVU.....
http://www.nvu.com/

have you tried either of those yourself DT?

(Brude was looking for you in the pub last night btw)

What you were looking at Strix was the website wizard NOT the webspace - two totally different things!!

have you tried either of those yourself DT?

(Brude was looking for you in the pub last night btw)
Haven't used either Strix (I use Dreamweaver) but they have been recommended on here many times for being good plus easy to use. (And free)

Sorry I didn't stick around last night, I just popped out for a lone chillout pint - see you next time!!

What you were looking at Strix was the website wizard NOT the webspace - two totally different things!!soooo, we'd still need to find a separate web builder?

if we go with that route, we've been offered free hosting by a kind member of the forum :)

thanks for the links though - it does look like a useful site for other applications :)

Haven't used either Strix (I use Dreamweaver) but they have been recommended on here many times for being good plus easy to use. (And free)

Sorry I didn't stick around last night, I just popped out for a lone chillout pint - see you next time!!

thanks DT - I'll check them out then (is dreamweaver a HTML thing or is it an easy to use wysiwyg thing?)

(I thought you may have been out for a quiet escape - so I didn't bring bouncy paws to pounce on you and slobber all over your Fergus snuffs :rolleyes: )

Dreamweaver has two seperate 'views' you can use it as wysiwig and then click to see the resulting html (and indeed continue to edit in html mode should you wish)

In terms of using it in wysiwig style, still lots more involved than something like namu 6

If you wish to try out Dreamweaver, get in touch!

Dreamweaver is a very good web authoring package....if you know what you are doing. It has a near vertical learning curve otherwise.
For web design get a full time pro to do any coding work, to be sure of a site that will work correctly in all OSes and Browsers. It is not something best left to hobbyists/mates.
I used to work in web design, but now I'd get someone else to write my code as it's too much effort to keep up with all the hacks needed to make sites work.

Thanks DT - I might have to take you up on that offer :) (though I think I've muddled up your's and Longshank's phone numbers when I swapped phones :blush:

Jezzy - unless you're volunteering to do it for free, the daily updating required means that we don't have any option but to do our own stuff ;)

what does anybody think of this thing btw?
http://www.virtualmechanics.com/index.html
(if you haven't used it can you run an experienced eye over it please? :) )

Strix - Even if updating yourself, there is no need to touch any code if site is designed properly. You simply have the site designed in Dreamweaver and then update using Contribute which allows you to alter content, but not code.
http://www.adobe.com/products/contribute/features/

There a lots of programmes that can output code like Virtual Mechanic, even Photoshop can output code, but none of them will be able to tweak code to make it work in all browsers on all OSes. Not even DW can do that. There's a real skill to site coding, especially when using CSS. I come across sites all the time where it's obvious the site has not been tested properly. Businesses trying to save money by going cheap and losing customers in the process.
All browser render code differently and for no good reason really. When IE was 95% of the browser market, you could simply design for IE and get away with it, most of the time. Now, there are lots of browsers, more people using alternatives to Windows, so it's a lot harder.

I had a look at the site in question, which I presume is Rain Rescue [it's a Charity site with current hosting problems]. The site is consistent in all the main browsers, inc Safari on the Mac. So that's good.
What isn't so good is the mess the code is in, which makes for more painful updating I'd guess. There's a lot of unnecessary formating in the code. An awful lot.
And what you would expect from a site put together by someone who doesn't understand coding or by a WYSIWYG web package. But it does seem to work OK as far as I can see, which is the main thing.

Thanks Jezzy :)

I've no idea how the updating actually takes place, as I don't do it, but I know what you mean from having been part of the team constructing the FAQ section for CADTutor.net - the database allowed (supposedly) wysiwyg editing, but if you went back and edited an original question, it threw all kinds of code in that wasn't required and spat out some strange results which couldn't be cured without digging about in the HTML (if I've not got my jargon all wrong!)

anyway - the site is actually very unstable as it is (according to our hosts who have washed their hands of the problem) so we are deffo moving to another way of doing this

you're recommending we have somebody construct us a template and let us faff about with the bits in the middle then?

(I'm an analytical kind of person, and I suspect we'd have less work to do if the site was better constructed, but basically it's grown organically into that shape)

Yup you get a site up, pref done with CSS, so someone [who knows CSS] can easily change look and feel of whole site by altering the Style sheet [CSS=Cascading Style Sheet].
Then in the place where the content goes [i.e. not navigation headers etc], you allow that to be user editable so the user simply adds text + images and the style sheet will then determine how they display.
A template, as such, is what the site pages are based around. Get that bit right and everything else falls into place.

To summarise content and design should be two separate issues. So you provide content and then let style sheet makes it look nice.
Does that make sense?

I don't know what your budget is or if you have one, but a little bit of money spent here could save you an awful lot of time and therefore a lot more money in the long term. I can recommend a coder if you want one, he does freelance work for other web companies and is highly recommended by people I know that use him.

that sounds like it works the way it does/should at the moment, but could be tailored better to how we want it to look :)

I think we have somebody who can do this for us already, but I'll come back to you if necessary :thumbsup:

thanks for all the advice :)

Looking at the code, that's not how it works at present!
And if the person you have did the previous version, then you'll end up with the same issues.

erm, nope - the version we have at the mo is from a template from 1&1 as far as I know - and that's the whole problem

The person we have is more technically competent than that, and has volunteered their services for the charity :)

That's sounds good. Let's hope it gets sorted.